First of all, it's not just in Norway that the bridal crown is an old custom. To use the modern names of places, I've found references to similar customs in Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, and Russia. In all of them, the bridal crown is a family heirloom, passed from mother or grandmother to daughter, who wears it only on her wedding day. Many stay in the family for centuries. They are almost never found by archaeologists; when they are, it's in a site that had been abandoned immediately after a violent assault.
I've not been able to find references to the origin of this custom. While it wasn't mentioned in the Pagan age, the earliest mentions post-Conversion I've seen reference to (13th Century) talk about it being an ancient custom. This leads me to suspect a pre-Christian custom that no one bothered to write down until centuries after Conversion, and possibly modified in the generation or two after Conversion; but I'm going with my gut, without solid proof.
The best reconstruction for the whole ceremony I've found was the Viking Answer Lady web site (together with more than two score references). Here are a few relevant quotations:
The bride would probably be sequestered before the wedding with female attendants, presumably her mother, other married women, and perhaps a gyðja to supervise her preparations. In order to provide a visible symbol of the loss of her former role as a maiden, the new bride might be stripped of her old clothing, and any symbols of her unwed status such as the kransen, a gilt circlet that was worn by medieval Scandinavian girls of gentle birth upon the outspread hair that was likewise a token of her virginity. . .
To replace the kransen she wore as a maiden, the bride would instead wear the bridal-crown, a heirloom kept by her family and worn only during the wedding festivities . . . Although none of the sources I have seen have confirmed the use of the bridal crown in the pagan Viking period, it was worn in the Middle Ages in Scandinavia, and the age of the custom is further attested in the Continental Germanic tradition of the Feast of St. Lucy, where a maiden designated as the "Lucy Bride" is dressed in a crown ornamented with burning candles.
[After the ceremony and feasting, the bride is prepared in the bed-chamber for the groom's arrival]: The bride would once again be arrayed in the bridal crown, which would be removed by her husband before the assembled witnesses as a symbol of sexual union. At some point in antiquity, this ritual defloration may have been an actual one, witnessed by the male and female attendants. After the witnesses left, presumably with much ribaldry and hilarity as is customary in country nuptials, the wedding was consummated. The bride's dream's that night would be noted, for they were held to be prophetic of the number of children she would bear, the fortune of her marriage, and the destiny of her descendants.
The next morning, the new husband and wife were once again parted for a short time. The bride was assisted by her attendants in dressing, and at this time her hair was braided or bound up in the coiffure reserved for married women. The universal Scandinavian symbol of the wife was now hers to wear as well: this was the hustrulinet, a long, snow-white, finely-pleated linen cloth.
As you can see from these excerpts, the wedding crown was a symbol of the bride's transition from unmarried young woman to wife. It was worn for the in-between stage, when one was no longer a maiden, but not quite yet a wife. Because the early church (and some of the modern ones) regarded such transitions as instant, I'm not surprised that facts supporting the argument that the transition took a period of time were not recorded until memories of pre-Conversion customs were fading.
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