Kristin Lavransdatter Read online

  Table of Contents

  PENGUIN CLASSICSDELUXE EDITION

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  I: THE WREATH

  PART I - J ØRUNDGAARD

  PART II - THE WREATH

  PART III - LAVRANS BJØRGULFSØN

  II: THE WIFE

  PART I - THE FRUIT OF SIN

  PART II - HUSABY

  PARTIII - ERLEND NIKULAUSSØN

  III: THE CROSS

  PART I - HONOR AMONG KIN

  PART II - DEBTORS

  PART III - THE CROSS

  EXPLANATORY NOTES

  LIST OF HOLY DAYS

  PENGUIN CLASSICSDELUXE EDITION

  KRISTIN LAVRANSDATTER

  SIGRID UNDSET was born in Denmark in 1882, the eldest daughter of a Norwegian father and a Danish mother, and moved with her family to Oslo two years later. She published her first novel, Fru Marta Oulie (Mrs. Marta Oulie) in 1907 and her second book, Den lykkelige alder (The Happy Age), in 1908. The following year she published her first work set in the Middle Ages, Fortaellingen om Viga-Ljot og Vigdis (later translated into English under the title Gunnar’s Daughter and now available in Penguin Classics). More novels and stories followed, including Jenny (1911, first translated 1920), Fattige skjaebner (Fates of the Poor, 1912), Vaaren (Spring, 1914), Splinten av troldspeilet (translated in part as Images in a Mirror, 1917), and De kloge jomfruer (The Wise Virgins, 1918). In 1920 Undset published the first volume of Kristin Lavransdatter, the medieval trilogy that would become her most famous work. Kransen (The Wreath) was followed by Husfrue (The Wife) in 1921 and Korset (The Cross) in 1922. Beginning in 1925 she published the four-volume Olav Audunssøn i Hestviken (translated into English under the title The Master of Hestviken), also set in the Middle Ages. In 1928 Sigrid Undset won the Nobel Prize in Literature. During the 1930s she published several more novels, notably the autobiographical Elleve aar (translated as The Longest Years, 1934). She was also a prolific essayist on subjects ranging from Scandinavian history and literature to the Catholic Church (to which she became a convert in 1924) and politics. During the Nazi occupation of Norway, Undset lived as a refugee in New York City. She returned home in 1945 and lived in Lillehammer until her death in 1949.

  TIINA NUNNALLY has translated all three volumes of Kristin Lavransdatter for Penguin Classics. She won the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize for the third volume, The Cross. Her translations of the first and second volumes, The Wreath and The Wife, were finalists for the PEN Center USA West Translation Award, and The Wife was also a finalist for the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize. Her other translations include Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales; Undset’s Jenny; Per Olov Enquist’s The Royal Physician’s Visit (Independent Foreign Fiction Prize); Peter Høeg’s Smilla’s Sense of Snow (Lewis Galantière Prize given by the American Translators Association); Jens Peter Jacobsen’s Niels Lyhne (PEN Center USA West Translation Award); and Tove Ditlevsen’s Early Spring (American-Scandinavian Foundation Translation Prize). Also the author of three novels, Maija, Runemaker, and Fate of Ravens, Nunnally holds an M.A. in Scandinavian Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

  BRAD LEITHAUSER is the author of several novels, including Darlington’s Fall, A Few Corrections, The Friends of Freeland, and Equal Distance, as well as poetry and essays. His work appears regularly in The New York Review of Books, his awards include a MacArthur Fellowship, and he is Emily Dickinson Lecturer in the Humanities at Mount Holyoke College, where he teaches courses in writing and literature.

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  This edition first published in Penguin Books 2005

  Translation and notes copyright © Tiina Nunnally, 1997, 1999, 2000

  Introduction copyright © Brad Leithauser, 2005 All rights reserved

  The Wreath, The Wife, and The Cross are published in individual volumes by Penguin Books.

  These works were originally published in Norwegian by H. Aschehoug & Company, Oslo: The Wreath

  under the title Kransen in 1920; The Wife as Husfrue in 1921; and The Cross as Korset in 1922.

  Mr. Leithauser’s introduction first appeared in The New York Reviw of Books.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Undset, Sigrid, 1882-1949.

  [Kristin Lavransdatter. English]

  Kristin Lavransdatter / Sigrid Undset ; translated with notes by Tiina Nunnally ;

  introduction by Brad Leithauser.

  p. cm.

  Originally published as 3 separate works: New York : Penguin Books, 1997-2000.

  Contents: 1. The wreath—2. The wife—3. The cross.

  eISBN: 9781101230565

  I. Nunnally, Tiina, 1952- II. Title.

  PT8950.U5K713 2005

  839.82’372—dc 2005048941

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  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 Vehicle
s, 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 Andressøn, an honorable, thoughtful, devoted, and woefuly unglamorous man. Kristin falls instead for Erlend Nikulaussøn, 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.

  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 Andressøn 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.)