Handfasting

Handfasting is a traditional practice that, depending on the term's usage, may define an unofficiated wedding (in which a couple marries without an officiant, usually with the intent of later undergoing a second wedding with an officiant), a betrothal (an engagement in which a couple has formally promised to wed, and which can be broken only through divorce), or a temporary wedding (in which a couple makes an intentionally temporary marriage commitment). The phrase refers to the making fast of a pledge by the shaking or joining of hands.

The terminology and practice are especially associated with Germanic peoples, including the English and Norse, as well as the Scots. As a form of betrothal or unofficiated wedding, handfasting was common up through Tudor England; as a form of temporary marriage, it was practiced in 17th-century Scotland and has been revived in Neopaganism, though misattributed as Celtic rather than Danish and Old English.

Sometimes the term is also used synonymously with "wedding" or "marriage" among Neopagans to avoid perceived non-Pagan religious connotations associated with those terms. It is also used, apparently ahistorically, to refer to an alleged pre-Christian practice of symbolically fastening or wrapping the hands of a couple together during the wedding ceremony.