Giving away the bride: an outdated idea?

"Should a woman be handed over from one man to another? In today's egalitarian society, that is very strange", says Hallgeir Elstad. He is a professor of recent church history at the Faculty of Theology at the University of Oslo and an ordained priest in the Church of Norway. He spoke with several other theologians and priests with the Christian Norwegian daily Vårt Land.

In a recent Facebook post, an Oslo priest wrote that with the current tradition, "women are rented out on the church floor like cattle". Instead of walking to the altar with their husband -as the Church of Norway suggests- they walk up with their father.

Theologian Elstad wants to discuss the fact that the custom of the father accompanying the bride has become the dominant thing at church weddings and believes that it is because people see this as "the traditional way". "The arrangement is neither traditional nor modern. In the old farming community, the couple went to the altar together, symbolising that marriage is an independent choice and entered into voluntarily."

Elstad investigated when the trend came to Norway. It turned out to be less than a hundred years ago and only became popular in the upper echelons of society. "It started among the bourgeoisie in the cities and has spread further down the social strata. It is uncertain when this arrangement became dominant, but it probably became the main trend from the 60s onwards."

The father escorting the bride is a tradition imported to Norway during the last century and came from a time when women were not regarded as independent legal subjects. According to Vart Land, it has only been a few decades since the villages in Norway took the trend from the bigger cities. In the village, the old Norwegian tradition that the couple went to the altar together lasted much longer.

Elstad believes that the church should be better at informing about this and, in that way, encourage brides and grooms to go for an equal solution.

However, not everyone thinks the current situation is a problem. Chaplain Arnfinn Eng says that eight out of ten couples choose for the bride to be accompanied into the church by their father. "Being followed in by one's father is a patriarchal tradition, but I don't find that any couples think about it that way, so it's not something I problematise either."