Bride-Price

The Institution of Marriage in Viking Society

Marriage during the Viking Age was a complex and crucial institution that shaped the lives and roles of everyone in Medieval Scandinavian Society. To truly understand what made Viking marriage unique, we must first briefly explore the importance of the social networking that was central to their communities before the advent of the later Scandinavian Kingdoms. To the Vikings, the most foundational social unit was what we will refer to as the "household" (not in a physical sense, as in a farmstead or longhouse, but as a simple term to denote a close-knit, often blood-related group of people). A household could consist of a single family or multiple families beholden to the will of the most influential male member. In the smallest households, consisting of just one family, this individual might be the father or grandfather, and in the larger households, this could be the wealthiest patriarch of an extended family or a chieftain to which other men in the household swore loyalty.

"Be a friend

to your friend,

and repay each gift with a gift.

Repay laughter

with laughter,

repay treachery with treachery." - Havamal stanza 42 (Dr. Jackson Crawford Translation)

The glue that held households together, aside from general familial affection, was the practice of gift-giving. Gift-giving could take the form of a chieftain rewarding his hirð (retinue of armed and loyal warriors) with a share of the booty from a recent raid, to the inheritance a first-born son would receive from a deceased father. The better and more frequent the gift-giving, the more influence the gift-giver could expect to retain. Recipients were expected to reciprocate with their own gift-giving, perhaps in the form of tribute, or maybe in the form of labor or martial service. Before concepts such as Divine Right to Rule, which was prevalent in the Christian cultures in Europe, became mainstay in Scandinavia, this is how authority, influence, and wealth were acquired and maintained in Viking society. Naturally, this meant that the more one expanded one's social network (that is, the network of allied individuals and households that might make up a loose social, political and/or economic entity), the more these sorts of exchanges would take place and the more influential one became. This type of structure is, of course, quite a bit more nuanced and complex than I have described here, and merits its own more in depth exploration in another article or two, but for the purposes of understanding Viking marriage, it will do.

Viking marriage was, at its core, a contract arranged between two households for their mutual benefit.