What happened at a viking wedding?

Answer 1

Primarily, marriage was a contractual arrangement between the families of the bride and groom in the Viking Age, just as it was throughout other areas of medieval Europe. The primary sources for the Viking period come from Archaeology, runic inscriptions, and contemporary literary evidence provided by Arabic travelers and German chroniclers such as Adam of Bremen. In Scandinavia and Iceland the ideal woman was expected to be chaste before marriage and faithful within it.

The first part of the religious ritual was designed to summon the attention of the gods and goddesses via invocation and possibly sacrifice. Next, the groom would present his bride with the sword of his ancestors which he had so recently recovered. She then gave her husband the sword which had preceeded her to the ceremony. Following the exchange of swords, the bride and groom exchanged finger rings. With the rings upon their hands, and their hands joined upon the sword-hilt, the couple then spoke their vows.

After the conclusion of the wedding ceremony came the bruð-hlaup or bride-running. When the bride arrived at the door of the hall, she was met by the groom, who blocked her entrance into the house with his bared sword laid across the entry-way. Once within the hall, the groom would plunge his sword into the rooftree or a supporting pillar of the house to test the luck of the marriage by the depth of the scar he made. These preliminaries over, the feast began.

The next legal requirement of the marriage was that the groom must be put to bed with his wife.