Kristin Lavransdatter （Kristin Lavransdatter #1-3）
Sigrid Undset
INTRODUCTION
LADY WITH A PAST
MY FIRST FORAY into the world of Kristin Lavransdatter, the Nobel laureate Sigrid Undset’s celebrated trilogy of novels set in fourteenth-century Norway, turned out to be a reading experience like no other. I’m thinking here less of the books themselves （though these were an unexpected delight, a convincing twentieth-century evocation of medieval Norway） than of the personal encounters the books fostered.
The trilogy runs over one thousand pages in the old three-in-one Knopf hardcover I’d picked up secondhand, and I chose to read it slowly, for weeks on end, lugging the hefty, handsome volume everywhere I went. One of its themes is the stubborn power of magic—the bewitching allure of pagan practices in a society that had officially but not wholeheartedly embraced Christianity—and the trilogy did seem to work magical effects: it drew elderly women to me.
Memory tells me that this must have happened seven or eight times, but probably it was more like four. In any event, the encounters were much of a piece. An older woman sitting by me on the subway, or waiting beside me in a line at the Department of Motor Vehicles, or having lunch at a nearby table, would cross the boundary separating strangers in order to volunteer that she, too, had once read Kristin Lavransdatter—a remark accompanied by that special glow which comes at the recollection of a distant but enduring pleasure.
1.
Early in the trilogy arrives a moment emblematic of Undset’s over-arching ambitions and designs. For the first time in her life our heroine, Kristin Lavransdatter, age seven, leaves the valley that has heretofore circumscribed her existence. A new sort of panorama beckons and beguiles: There were forest-clad mountain slopes below her in all directions; her valley was no more than a hollow between the enormous mountains, and the neighboring valleys were even smaller hollows . . . Kristin had thought that if she came up over the crest of her home mountains, she would be able to look down on another village like their own, with farms and houses, and she had such a strange feeling when she saw what a great distance there was between places where people lived.
The revelation is geographical for Kristin but temporal for the reader, who also is to be granted a breathtaking new vista, as a world many centuries old emerges with crystalline clarity. Indeed, the book’s deepest pleasures may be retrocessive. The trilogy advances with a relentless forward motion, following Kristin methodically from the age of seven until her death, at about fifty, from the Black Death, but the reader’s greatest thrill is the rearward one of feeling tugged back into a half-pagan world where local spirits still inhabit the streams and cairns and shadowy forests. The trilogy sets us in an earlier age that looks back, uneasily, on a still earlier age.
Kristin Lavransdatter was a publishing phenomenon. My own edition was the seventeenth printing—an elaborate clothbound hardcover published in 1973, a half century after the trilogy first appeared in English. The trilogy was a main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, where its striking success elicited an unprecedented testimonial: “We consider it the best book our judges have ever selected and it has been better received by our subscribers than any other book.”
Continuously in print for three-quarters of a century, Kristin Lavransdatter is today that rarity of foreign twentieth-century novels: one with competing translations available. Still, it plainly hasn’t captivated later generations as it once did. Though Undset may well be, even now, the best-known modern Scandinavian novelist in the United States, she has been little embraced by academia （which has overlooked Scandinavia generally, apart from its play wrights）， and the trilogy is perhaps gradually moving, in the language of the blurb, from “beloved masterpiece” to “cult classic.” When, in 2001, Steerforth Press brought out The Unknown Sigrid Undset, a collection that presented both Undset’s wonderful early book Jenny—a novel set in modern Rome—and a sampling of her letters, its title raised the question whether there is a “known” Undset in this country.
Kristin Lavransdatter’s dense, decade-spanning plot might be summarized as the story of a daddy’s girl who refuses daddy’s choice of a husband and marries for love, with often harrowing long-range consequences. Kristin’s father wishes her to marry Simon Andress?n, an honorable, thoughtful, devoted, and woefuly unglamorous man. Kristin falls instead for Erlend Nikulauss?n, a proud, impulsive, fearless young knight who seems constitutionally unable to steer clear of scandal. After having pledged her love to him, she finds out that Erlend has already fathered children through an adulterous liaison, and when he and Kristin are wed—for the headstrong girl squelches all paternal objections and marries the man of her choice—she is already secretly pregnant. For Kristin, the wedding turns out to be a literally nauseating dissimulation, an unshakable bout of morning sickness as her father gives her away with all the pomp appropriate to a virgin bride. No matter how many children she has under the sanction of holy wedlock—she and Erlend wind up with seven sons—she still feels like a transgressor.