Like the earlier Jenny, whose heroine is a modern Norwegian art student in Rome who disdains a suitor for the suitor’s father, Kristin Lavransdatter is the tale of a scandalous woman. That the trilogy’s readers are meant to regard Kristin sympathetically is but one sign of Undset’s bold and nuanced treatment of sexuality. Although the trilogy’s sex is hardly graphic （almost the only reference to genitalia arises when, in a skirmish, Erlend receives a spear wound to, significantly, his groin）， Undset repeatedly lets us know that her heroine is a slave to carnal desires, as when, not long before his death, Erlend discomfits his wife with a casual, jesting reference to those days when her nails dug so deeply into his skin as to leave him bleeding.
In the annals of literary “fallen women,” Kristin Lavransdatter, that twentieth-century/fourteenth-century literary figure, occupies a curious and fascinating place. After they fell, a number of Kristin’s nineteenth-century counterparts were whisked offstage, often to meet a premature end. In the latter part of the twentieth century, many of Kristin’s successors were sexual adventuresses whose exploits were pure and liberated triumphs. Writing in the first quarter of the twentieth century, Undset chose a middle path for her heroine. Kristin never doubts that she has covertly sinned, and the pain of her deceptions remains a lifelong affliction. Even so, her unshakable guilt in no way paralyzes her and she carries on with her life. Throughout the trilogy, Kristin is an indomitable presence in every role she undertakes—mother, mistress of an estate, and even, in her final days, sometime religious pilgrim who chooses to close her life in a nunnery.
Kristin’s painful wedding is both a commencement and a culmination: her life progresses as though her squalid seduction, set in a brothel room obtained by Erlend as a means of protecting their privacy, must forever discolor connubial relations. “The Devil cannot have so much power over a man that I would ever cause you sorrow or harm,” Erlend naively vows after seducing her, yet he has already planted the seeds of distress that eventually will all but destroy his beloved. Actually, their doomed marriage—they eventually part physically, although psychologically they can never sever the tortured bonds between them—is but one of the trilogy’s numerous portraits of domestic discord and blight. At the very close of the first volume, we learn that the marriage of Kristin’s parents is also rooted in deception. Undset’s characters are near-contemporaries of Chaucer’s pilgrims, and they might likewise “speke of wo that is in mariage.”
Undset’s greatest literary strength reveals itself bit by bit, in the way the passions of Kristin, Erlend, and Simon Andress?n play out in all their intricate and lingering aftereffects. Simon’s transformation is particularly affecting. He begins as a promising and enthusiastic suitor of a beautiful young girl, Kristin Lavransdatter; comes to harbor doubts about her devotion; discovers her affair with Erlend and, brandishing a sword, seeks to “rescue” her; in time enters a kind of collusion with the lovers, who convince him not to disclose the affair to Kristin’s father; and eventually marries a homely but wealthy widow, leaving unspoken much of the hurt and regret he clearly feels. The trilogy achieves an exceptional sense of accumulating dailiness, of momentous actions concatenating in all sorts of minute and unexpected evolutions.
The burning lust between Kristin and Erlend feels doubly real, not merely plausible but also proximate. But no less real is that variable, volatile mixture of remorse, shame, loyalty, and fondness which their youthful passion retrospectively stirs. It’s one of the reasons the two of them can never fully part—the memories of a passion so urgent that all other considerations, moral and practical, were subsumed by it. When you enter Kristin Lavransdatter, you enter a marriage, a contract expansively unfolding through time. Disturbingly, fascinatingly, it’s a union of two people who share a proud, combative stubbornness that ultimately undoes them.
2.
As a writer renowned for her medieval epics, Undset came by her calling honestly. Born in Denmark in 1882, she grew up in Norway, within a household permeated by vanished societies. Her Norwegian father and well-educated Danish mother collaborated professionally, he as an archeologist and she as his secretary and illustrator. Sigrid was reared among archeological relics and manuscripts. Her naturally derived feeling of being at home in earlier centuries protected her from the great occupational hazard of the historical novelist: the urge to display just how much scholarship has gone into the past’s disinterment. Kristin Lavransdatter reflects deep reading, as well as a close-at-hand tactile familiarity with the everyday objects of fourteenth-century Norway, but Undset’s research is mainly concealed. You never sense the burden of heavy labor in her prose. Yet she seems intimately acquainted with the clothes and the diet, the customs and the politics, the architecture and the thinking of the people she writes about. The farm where Kristin grows up feels like a working farm.