Getting Legally Married in Norway as an American: A Guide
Photo from our ceremony, captured by Christin Eide
If you want to get the legal obligations of marriage completed when you elope somewhere beautiful like the Lofoten Islands in Norway, there is a bit of a process that must be completed before your big day. This guide will help clarify that process so you can complete it with ease.
So, Why Norway?
When Emily and I decided to have an elopement style wedding rather than having a traditional approach, we first looked at some obvious choices near us in New England. Acadia National Park, the White Mountains in New Hampshire, or maybe somewhere on the West Coast like Olympic National Park. The idea was a place where we could combine my love for the mountains and Emily’s love for the ocean.
Everything changed when Emily and I elected to volunteer to give up our seats on a return flight from Colorado. We had to wait an additional 2 hours for the next flight, however we were both walking away with nearly $2000 of flight ticket vouchers. The idea of an international marriage was born right there.
To avoid straying TOO far from the point (squirrel), we were between experiencing the van life and exploring in either the Dolomites, New Zealand, or Lofoten, with Lofoten being our winner after a slide show pitch was created for each location.
The Process
So, if you have decided you want to be legally married in Norway as 2 foreign citizens, you will each have to provide the following documents to receive your marriage license:
A Personal Declaration
A Sponsor Statement
A Declaration of Division (Only if you have been married before)
Proof of Name, Age, and Citizenship
Certificate of No Impediment to Marriage
Lawful Residence in Norway
Unfortunately, as a foreign citizen you cannot complete the application online, so all documents and forms must be filled out with pen and ink, and mailed to Norway. This can get expensive if you fail to complete a form properly and have to mail additional documentation.
Personal Declaration
The Personal Declaration is completed using the Norwegian Government’s official form, Q-0150, which can be downloaded from their website here. On this form you will provide some boilerplate information like your name, date of birth, address, etc.
Arguably the most important part of this form is the information about the time and place of your marriage. Specifically, the Date, Country, and Place of Marriage. The Place of Marriage is specifically wanting to know the name of the Church, Town Hall, Embassy, etc. Since we were eloping, we used the address of the Airbnb we were staying at.
If you are planning to go this route, it is crucial to understand that once your paperwork is approved, you have a 4 month window from the date your application for a marriage license is approved, so knowing where you are going to have your ceremony is a must.
Sponsor Statement
Similar to the Personal Declaration, the Sponsor Statement is completed using the official form, Q-0151, which can be downloaded from their website here. Now is the time to reach out to your friend or family member of your choice, so long as they are at least 18 years old and know you well. They will have to fill out the form providing their name, date of birth, and mailing address (N/A for the National ID Number since that is not applicable). Next they will put your name (Name of the party they are a sponsor for), as well as name of the other party to the marriage. This form is straight forward, and just required a signature and the place and date they are completing this form. My sponsor used their current physical address at the time they filled out the form.
Declaration of Division
As we have never been married before, we did not have to fill out this documentation, and therefore I will not speak to how to fill this out. You can find the guidance for this section of the paperwork here.
Proof of Name, Age, and Citizenship
Providing this documentation is arguably the easiest part of this process. Get a good quality scan of your Passport on a copy machine and print it off. Boom. Done.
Now hopefully if you are planning to get married in Norway you already have a passport by the time you are filling this out. If for some reason you do not, you are also able to submit an original birth certificate accompanied with an apostille, which is essentially a document from your state government certifying the document can be used internationally in the intended country.
Certificate of No Impediment to Marriage
This documentation is to confirm that there are no legal obstacles for you to get married in Norway, such actively being married to someone else. Providing this documentation is where we went wrong in our application. One would think that going to your state office and getting documentation from the office of vital records that there is no record of you being married would be sufficient, makes sense right? HOWEVER, marriage records are not kept on a federal level in the U.S of A, only on a state level, so if you only provide a document from the state you live in, this documentation will be deemed as insufficient because there ate 49 other States you could be married in. See the issue?
The resolution for this is much more simple than I’ve dramatically detailed this to be. You can quite literally create your own word document or modify a template like this one. Once you have that filled out, you must then get this document notarized, and then to your state office for an apostille. It is important to note that the document cannot receive an apostille mark if the notary is from a different state.
Lawful Residence in Norway
The title of this is a little deceiving. You might be thinking “Grafton, obviously I’m an American citizen, that’s why I’ve read this dang post in the first place”, I empathize. A very easy way to satisfy this documentation is to simply print off your flight information of when you are entering the country, and when you are leaving, letting them know you can legally travel to Norway.
Submitting the Documentation
Once you both have completed all the required documentation, you must mail it to the following address:
Skatteetaten
Postboks 9200 Grønland
0134 Oslo
Norway
Additionally, I included a separate piece of paper that included my email address for any additional communication required. If you can’t contact them via email, your only options are by calling their office (which incurs international phone charges) or by written mail which takes quite a while.
The Ceremony
We used a Humanist Celebrant to conduct the legal ceremony and file the paperwork. It is extremely easy to work with them and they have a thorough guide on what they offer and how to contact them, which can be found here. You will need 2 witnesses for your legal ceremony in Norway. Our elopement photographer (Christin Eide, magician behind the camera and total badass) served as one, and Emily’s Hair/Makeup artist served as our secondary.
How you go about a second witness is completely up to you, however the Celebrant might not be comfortable with a random stranger on top of a mountain fulfilling that role, so it is important to communicate any expectations or concerns about witnesses with the Celebrant ahead of time.
Closing Notes
Because we had only supplied the no impediment for marriage documentation for Rhode Island, this added about 2 months into the process. Their initial notification of insufficient documentation came by mail almost a month after we had submitted the documentation, and then a scramble to create and notarize/apostille the correct documentation. We left June 26th for Norway, and our approval for a marriage license came on June 22nd. As you can imagine, that creates a significant amount of stress, so by following this guide, you can avoid our mistakes!
The Norwegian Tax Administration’s full page of getting married as two foreign citizens in Norway can be found here, but if you have any additional questions on this process, feel free to contact us and we will do our best to help!