Kristin Lavransdatter: Sigrid Undset

Så blev allting borta i en mörkröd dimma och ett brus, som först tilltog skrämmande, men så dog dånet småningom bort, och den röda dimman blev tunnare och ljusare, och till sist var den som ett lätt morgondis, innan solen bryter igenom, och det var alldeles ljudlöst, och hon visste att nu dog hon -”
― Sigrid Undset, The Cross

I included a quote from the original language of Kristn Lavransdatter, that is, Norwegian. I thought, perhaps there are some Vikings wandering around our parish. I think it is helpful to remember that this book is about a different time and a different place. I loved this book and Sigrid Undsets ability to bring this world and its characters to life. 

This book is a Catholic classic. In fact, Sigrid Undset, a Norwegian and Danish author,  converted to Catholicism the year after she completed this trilogy. She also wrote a highly praised biography of Catherine of Siena.  I want to read it and will report upon completion!

Kristin Lavransdatter (‘Kristin, Lavrans daughter) is a 1920s novel that follows its protagonist Kristin from her time as a little girl growing up in a loving family of farmers in medieval Norway to her death about 1,000 pages later. The novel follows her life through her seduction, marriage, motherhood, the marriage of her sons and her death in a convent while nursing the victims of the plague. The complete work originally composed in Norwegian is actually three novels with some wonderful insights:

“It’s a good thing when you don’t dare do something if you don’t think it’s right. But it’s not good when you think something’s not right because you don’t dare do it.” - Sigrid Undset, The Wreath

The Books

• The Wreath

This part of the trilogy opens in 1306 Norway when Kristin's little more than a toddler and continues through to her young womanhood--so this is her coming of age story.  The Wreath tells the story of her reaching puberty, almost being raped by a very bad priest, and loving (emotionally) a young friend who is murdered. She is blamed, although blameless, and sent to a convent in Oslo where she is seduced by a knight of questionable character who is ten years her senior. At the time, she was betrothed to a steady, dependable farmer who she did not want to marry. Whoever does in novels? The first novel ends with her marriage to the knight Erlend. She wears the bridal wreath as if she was a maiden. Unbeknownst to her loving father, she is already pregnant by her lover at age 17. Oh my! A holy Franciscan friar counsels her:

Dear sister—all other love is merely a reflection of the heavens in the puddles of a muddy road. You will become sullied too if you allow yourself to sink into it. But if you always remember that it’s a reflection of the light from that other home, then you will rejoice at its beauty and take good care that you do not destroy it by churning up the mire at the bottom.”   ― Sigrid Undset, Kristin Lavransdatter

Kristin is not good a taking advice, it turns out. 

• The Wife

The second novel begins with the wealthy and handsome, though undependable, Erland taking his new bride to his substantial estate in Husaby, near Nidaros. The story follows the industrious Kristin as she settles in as a wife and makes a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Olaf to seek the forgiveness of her serious sins. Eventually, she has seven sons. Erlend makes some huge political blunders that puts the entire family’s future and his life at risk. The novel ends with the death of Kristin’s father and her return with her family to her ancestral home.
 

• The Cross

The final novel, tells the story of Kristin’s sons coming to adulthood. Her husband is killed and she has to deal with the aftermath. One of her sons abducts a child bride (14 years old and sharp as a tack) and brings her home. The innocent young bride dominates the home and Kristin feels it best to leave her ancestral manor, enter a convent and do penance for her sins. There she dies of the plague finding her salvation in her care of others who are also dying. Plague is obviously a big killer in medieval Norway. Her moment of realization, "But I didn’t realize then that the consequence of sin is that you have to trample on other people.” As she is completing her pilgrimage to Nidaros and then to the convent, she reflects as an old woman on her life:

"She had finally come so far that she seemed to be seeing her own life from the uppermost summit of a mountain pass. Now her path led down into the darkening valley, but first she had been allowed to see that in the solitude of the cloister and in the doorway of death someone was waiting for her who had always seen the lives of people the way villages look from a mountain crest. He had seen sin and sorrow, love and hatred in their hearts, the way the wealthy estates and poor hovels, the bountiful acres and the abandoned wastelands are all borne by the same earth. And he had come down among them, his feet had wandered among the lands, stood in the castles and in huts, gathering the sorrows and sins of the rich and the poor, and lifting them high up with him on the cross."  The Cross - Sigrid Undset 

Themes

• Motherhood

Kristin loves her babies and carries them "under her heart." She fears her own sins will visit punishment on her sons.   Her first son was conceived before her marriage, No one knew but her, and for her part, she could not forgive herself. 

“Conceived in sin. Carried under her hard, evil heart. Pulled out of her sin-tainted body, so pure, so healthy, so inexpressibly lovely and fresh and innocent. This undeserved benecence broke her heart in two; crushed with remorse, she lay there with tears welling up out of her soul like blood from a mortal wound.” - The Wife

Nonetheless, she tries to be a good mother, but was terribly possessive of her sons. Yet, this description rings true of the best of moms. Her sons would speak to her....

“She replied so much later that by that time they had forgotten what they had asked, But this didn’t bother them; they were used to the way their mother seemed not to listen when they spoke to her or the way she would wake up and give an answer after they had long forgotten their own question.” - The Wife

She loves her sons, but as they grow older, she resents her husband’s influence on them. It is difficult for her to let them go in an uncertain world offering an elusive stability.  Her husband, Erlend says to her,

"God help me, but it's as if you love them less now that you no longer have to worry for their sake."

One by one, however, they all leave and marry or die, leaving poor Kristin alone. She hears of the death of two of her sons in a monastery soon before succumbing to the plague herself. Her great joy was to reconcile with some of her alienated sons just before her death.

• Christianity

Kristin, following her parents example, is invariably kind to the wretched poor. She prays, but doesn’t always recognize God’s presence in her life. She gets good advice from admirable priests and bishops that she doesn’t follow. Yes, my friends, she did not listen to her parish priest, wise as he is. Very troubling indeed. In my opinion, a very authentic character with an authentic, but flawed faith. Yet, she had experienced love and mercy from her father whom she had offended mightily. She thought:

"She had thought that God was like her own father... All along she had expected, deep in her heart, that whenever the punishment became more than she could bear, then she would encounter not righteousness but mercy."

• Marriage

Not everything is good in her marriage and not everything is bad. Erland is not dependable, but he does love her. She is a stubborn person and he does not deal with frustration well. I thought it was a good story about marriage. At the end of her life when she reflected back on her passionate, but unhappy marriage and the death of her husband she thought:

The last clear thought that took shape in her mind was that she was going to die before the mark had time to fade, and it made her happy. It seemed to her a mystery that she could not comprehend, but she was certain that God had held her firmly in a pact which had been made for her, without her knowing it, from a love that had been poured over her – and in spite of her willfulness, in spite of her melancholy, earthbound heart, some of that love had stayed inside her, had worked on her like sun on the earth, had driven forth a crop that neither the fiercest fire of passion nor its stormiest anger could completely destroy. -The Cross

• Medieval Norway

Norway is in the process of being Christianized. The government is unstable due mostly to dynastic struggles and the interference of the Swedes and Danes. I thought it was an imaginative retelling of a medieval life as in the book series, Cadfael, another medieval tale form the same time period dealing with England during the civil war between the Empress Maude and King Stephen.

• Paganism

In the book’s opening scene, Kristin sees a wood elf watching her from the edge of the forest. Changelings and the mountain people are always lurking around and snatching kids. The mountain harbor trolls and worse lurk in the mountains.  She has some powers of sorcery and uses the turf from a graveyard to cure a dying child.  During the plague, she intervenes to prevent a child from being sacrificed to end the plague. The novel’s characters are caught between the poles of Christian belief and the old ways of ancient Scandinavia. The past always haunts the present and Kristin who is not a modern character. 

• Death

She suffered the death of the young man who was her childhood friend and love interest. She saw his corpse, grayish-yellow like mud, lips the color of lead, slightly parted so that his white teeth seemed to offer a mocking smile. It was devastating and horrible. 

Many years later, after she was the mother of seven sons, her father prepared her for his own death saying to her, “May God protect you, Kristin, my child, so that we might meet again on that day, all of us who were friends in this life ... and every human soul. Christ and the Virgin Mary and Saint Olav and Saint Thomas will keep you safe all your days.” Then, blessing his beloved daughter with the sign of the cross, he said, "May God have mercy on you. May God grant you light in the light of this world and in the great light beyond.” She sobbed, but as with every experience of her father, it also touched her deeply.

Then the time of her own death arrives. Here is a quote from near the end of "The Cross" the last book of the trilogy. Kristin is old and dying in a convent of the plague and the regrets over her many sins fade away into an experience of redemption:

On her death bed: “And her tears burst forth in a swift stream, for it seemed to her that never before had she understood to the full what it betokened. The life that ring had wed her to, that she had complained against, had murmured at, had raged at and defied – none the less she had loved it so, joyed in it so, both in good days and evil, that not one day had there been when ‘twould not have seemed hard to give it back to God, nor one grief that she could have forgone without regret—”
― Sigrid Undset, The Cross

A woman who had great virtues and faults. Kristin had a holy death. The night she fell into her last illness she intervened to save a young boy from being sacrificed in a pagan rite and gave a Christian burial to his deceased mother. Her dad would have been proud. She was in her 40s or early 50s. Her death is described:

Everything disappeared in a dark red haze and a roar, which at first grew fearfully loud, but then the din gradually died away, and the red fog became thinner and lighter, and at last it was like a fine morning mist before the sun breaks through, and there was not a sound, and she knew that she was dying.

Conclusion
A terrific story. I listened to it on Audible because Undset, who won the Nobel prize for literature for this trilogy, is a terrific story teller who has the ability to create believable and relatable characters. Undset is honored in Norway as a great writer and Kristin occupies a place similar to Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn. More than once you will find yourself saying, “Kristin, please don’t do that. Think of your poor parents.” She hurts the ones she loves. Read it!

From Amazon:

In her great historical epic  Kristin Lavransdatter, set in fourteenth-century Norway, Nobel laureate Sigrid Undset tells the life story of one passionate and headstrong woman. Painting a richly detailed backdrop, Undset immerses readers in the day-to-day life, social conventions, and political and religious undercurrents of the period. Now in one volume, Tiina Nunnally’s award-winning definitive translation brings this remarkable work to life with clarity and lyrical beauty.
As a young girl, Kristin is deeply devoted to her father, a kind and courageous man. But when as a student in a convent school she meets the charming and impetuous Erlend Nikulaussøn, she defies her parents in pursuit of her own desires. Her saga continues through her marriage to Erlend, their tumultuous life together raising seven sons as Erlend seeks to strengthen his political influence, and finally their estrangement as the world around them tumbles into uncertainty.
With its captivating heroine and emotional potency, Kristin Lavransdatter is the masterwork of Norway’s most beloved author—one of the twentieth century’s most prodigious and engaged literary minds—and, in Nunnally’s exquisite translation, a story that continues to enthrall.  This Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition includes an introduction by Brad Leithauser and features French flaps and deckle-edged paper.