Elisabeth and Rune Dalseth tied their knot on the 25th of August with a special wedding ceremony. They recreated a Viking weeding next to a beautiful Norwegian Lake, and it was the first Viking wedding in almost 1,000 years.
Like most wedding that take time organizing, this one required extra work because most of the stuff had to be made from the beginning. They prepared two longboats, found a pagan priest to prepare blood offerings taken from an innocent pig, that was later enjoyed as part of the feast, made the traditional dress and had a gothi to bless their weeding, which was not easy to find at all considering all the rituals one must know.
They didn’t have Spotify music, instead they sang and danced to live music that their ancestors danced to over a millennium ago.
Hunting horns were blown to signify it’s time for the people to assemble and witness the holy matrimony.
Surprisingly, none of them had been born or raised pagans. Rune was the one that had been part of the revivalist for 2 years, and then introduced Elisabeth into the culture. She slowly but surely began to fell in love with the Viking world and embraced the culture.
The purpose of Viking revivalists were to prevent more people from stigmatizing this fascinating culture with rape, violence, and war. “Vikings were no more terrible than any other group of people living at that time. What people don’t mention is that Vikings were people who had a great appreciation for nature, for the land, and for animal life. We want people to be more aware of that,” explains Rune.
The gothi, while holding a branch of dried rose in one hand, chants blessings to officiate the wedding.
He will use the blood sacrifice on his face and proceeds to hand a sword that both the man and woman must hold to signify harmonization and unification.
A lot of people were concerned how this wedding it was going to turn out. Even Rune’s mother had her doubts that her son was not going to get married in a Christian way.
“I think she has now come to accept it. She can see how happy paganism makes me and how it has helped me get my life together. Before I was a Viking, I didn’t have a wife, a baby and a house – now look at me,” said Rune.
And indeed, by the end a lot of people could feel the energy and love that was generated in the ceremony.
As you can see in the Brullaup, which is a race between two families who were unified through the wedding! Basically, the fun game time!
Now they have a 6-month-old baby, whom they named Ragnar and they also adopted a dog to be a part of their Viking family.
