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.
When Sigrid’s beloved father died, in 1893, the family found itself in sharply reduced circumstances. She abandoned her formal education while still in her mid-teens and took a secretarial job in an electrical company. She worked there for ten years. She wrote in her spare hours, embarking unsuccessfully on a pair of novels set in medieval times. An influential editor advised her to abandon such projects: “Don’t attempt any more historical novels. You have no talent for it. But you might try writing something modern. You never know.”
The pursuit of “something modern” led to Fru Marta Oulie, a contemporary tale of infidelity, published in 1907 and not yet published in English, and a collection of stories, presumably drawn from life—a number are about Norwegian office workers—followed a year later. The books were respectfully received and sold well. Nonetheless, Undset’s passion for an older world was unquenchable, and in 1909 she published a short novel set in the Middle Ages. (Under the title Gunnar’s Daughter, it first appeared in English in the thirties, and resurfaced as a Penguin Twentieth-Century Classic in 1998.) The first volume of Kristin Lavransdatter was published in Norway in 1920, with the second and third volumes appearing in succeeding years. The trilogy was quickly translated and just as quickly embraced across the globe. A medieval tetralogy, The Master of Hestviken, which also has at its heart a pair of passionate but troubled and guilt-stricken young lovers, followed in the mid-twenties. In 1928, at the age of forty-six, Undset received the Nobel Prize, chiefly for her medieval epics. She had surmounted every obstacle. In sales, number of translations, significant honors and reader loyalty, Sigrid Undset in 1928 was probably the most successful woman writer in the world.
Perhaps it’s unsurprising that things proceeded less smoothly in her personal life. In 1909, while traveling in Italy, she fell in love with Anders Castus Svarstad, a Norwegian painter thirteen years her senior. He was married, with three children. After an eventual divorce, Svarstad wed Undset, once more fathering three children, one of them severely retarded. In time, their marriage foundered and in 1924, after Undset converted from Lutheranism to Catholicism—a seemingly inevitable move for someone whose imagination was rooted in a pre-Reformation Europe—the marriage was annulled.
During the decade of her marriage, Undset published a book of feminist essays. As her translator Tiina Nunnally wryly points out in a helpful introduction to the trilogy’s first volume: “Her written positions were often in direct contradiction to her own life choices.” (Svarstad turned out to be a highly demanding partner, and it was only after she separated from him, in 1919, that her work took off.) For all the upheaval in her personal life, she remained steadily industrious and generous. She donated all her Nobel Prize money to charity and, a decade later, when the Soviets invaded Finland, she sold her Nobel medallion to support a relief fund for Finnish children. When the Nazis invaded Norway, Undset fled to the United States, settling in Brooklyn for a five-year exile, during which she traveled on many speaking tours on behalf of her homeland. She returned to Norway after the war to find her house seriously vandalized. Her health was broken, and she died in 1949, at the age of sixty-seven.
For an English-language reader, much about Undset’s life remains inaccessible, locked away in bibliographies that point toward Norwegian books and articles. This situation was somewhat amended by The Unknown Sigrid Undset, also translated by Nunnally, which includes Jenny, a pair of stories, and—especially welcome—a selection of Undset’s letters that throws welcome light on those apprentice years when the lowly office worker dreamed of a higher life. All of these letters were addressed to Andrea Hedberg, a friend who shared Undset’s literary interests and ambitions. The correspondence, which lasted more than forty years, originated through a Swedish pen-pal club. For any reader who has succumbed to the spell of Kristin Lavransdatter or The Master of Hestviken, there’s a privileged thrill in having these letters available, in hearing an elusive authorial voice, previously filtered through the Middle Ages, speaking immediately of its own concerns, whether in youth (“I’m only happy when I’m alone in the woods”) or in full adulthood (“On the morning of the 24th I gave birth to a son—a big strong boy—5 kilos”).
It’s a voice, one should add, that offers few surprises—insofar as the earnest, fervent, ambitious, far-seeing young electric company secretary is so recognizably, while yet in embryo, the author of the mature novels: Undset was high-minded from start to finish. She spoke freely and unselfconsciously to Hedberg about her coalescing artistic aims. Here is Undset at age seventeen: Sometimes I want so much to write a book . . . I’ve started a few times, but nothing comes of it, and I burn it at once. But it’s supposed to take place in 1340 . . . and there isn’t a single romantic scene in it. It’s about two young people—of course—Svend Tr?st and Maiden Agnete, whose unhappy story . . . an unhappy marriage that I won’t bother you with right now.