Kristin Lavransdatter Read online

  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 Trøst and Maiden Agnete, whose unhappy story . . . an unhappy marriage that I won’t bother you with right now.

  And here she is two years later:

  But it’s an artist that I want to be, a woman artist, and not a pen-wielding lady. . . . Furthermore, marriage makes most women stupid, or they dilute their demands on life, on their husband, and on themselves so much that they can scarcely be counted as human, or they become uncomprehending, vulgar, coarse, or unhappy.

  Yes, my dear Dea, I certainly hope you will take great joy and comfort from this edifying epistle. I’m keeping one consolation for my own use: I will!

  I will hold my head high, I will not buckle under.

  I will not commit suicide—will not waste my talents. If I have any, I will also find them and use them. I will be whatever I can be.

  While Kristin Lavransdatter is firmly rooted in a specific place and era—southern and central Norway in the first half of the fourteenth century—I suspect for most American readers the story has always been set in some misted Long Ago and Far Away. The medieval historian may find in it a careful account of political maneuvering and uncertainty, but the shifting intrigues following, say, the death of King Haakon (who reigned from 1299 to 1319) are likely to feel impossibly remote to the general reader. The trilogy’s earlier translation, by Charles Archer, may also have worked to deracinate the plot from its historical grounding. Archer’s many archaisms (“Yet did he look in his coarse homely clothing more high-born than many a knight,” “he had wrought scathe to the maidenhood of her spirit”) encourage us to transplant the plot into a realm detached from time, some enchanted Arthurian landscape of gallant knights and comely maidens.

  Nunnally’s translation redirects our attention. The florid constructions and whimsical quaintnesses have dropped away, and Undset emerges as a writer of spare vigor. Nunnally unquestionably brings us closer to the heart of the book than Archer did. While I have a lingering fondness for the Archer translation—he was the museum guide who first led me to the tapestry—on the grounds of lucidity and authenticity the nod must go to Nunnally, who has surely done as much as anyone in recent years to bring Nordic literature to this country. (She has translated, with fluency and grace, Knut Hamsun, Jens Peter Jacobsen, and Peter Høeg’s Smilla’s Sense of Snow.)

  If Archer’s translation scanted the trilogy’s treatment of medieval history, it may thereby have encouraged comparisons to figures less remote in time. Readers may have found in the trilogy’s headstrong and often self-destructive heroine a distant cousin to Vanity Fair’s Becky Sharpe and Gone with the Wind’s Scarlett O’Hara. In Erlend and Kristin’s ill-starred but unstoppable love affair, they may have detected a kinship with Wuthering Heights’s Heathcliff and Cathy. But Kristin Lavransdatter has a dimension these other books rarely aspired to: an encompassing religiosity. Only in the third volume does it grow apparent that the trilogy registers a gradual but inevitable repudiation of the flesh. The appetites of the young girl who lost her virginity in a brothel grow distant and Kristin finally winds up in a nunnery, ministering to others with extraordinary courage and selflessness during a sort of hallucinatory apocalypse—the arrival of the Black Death, which some historians estimate may have wiped out at least half the country’s population.

  The growing call of religion renders richly ambiguous the culminating events of Kristin’s life. One might view the trilogy as an accelerating accretion of tragedies, as Kristin’s poor abandoned suitor, Simon, whose love for her is hopeless and perpetual, goes to his deathbed with his faithfulness largely unnoticed or misunderstood by Kristin; as her marriage founders and she loses Erlend to a spear; as illness and blindness and plague pluck her children from her, one by one. The story might also be viewed as the record of a long, hard-won, noble victory, as the passionate teenager who brooks no curbs on her desires, recklessly sowing pain and destruction in the process, decades later renounces the decaying kingdom of the flesh for the indestructible domain of the spirit.

  Undset owed an incalculable debt to the anonymous Icelandic sagas of the thirteenth century, as she was the first to acknowledge. When she was ten, she fell under the spell of the longest and perhaps greatest of them, Njal’s Saga, whose elaborate chronicling of violent and implacable
feuds overwhelmed her young imagination; she later declared this the “most important turning point in my life.” Kristin Lavransdatter reflects many of the signature traits of the sagas: a matter-of-fact abruptness when unexpected catastrophe supervenes; a tendency to view characters externally, with only occasional ventures into the inner workings of their minds; a wry stoicism in the face of life’s merciless cruelty (Undset notes about Kristin’s mother, who lost her three sons in infancy: “People thought she took the deaths of her children unreasonably hard”); a fondness for characters prone to lengthy brooding silences finally punctuated by shattering admissions, as when Kristin’s mother stuns her husband by announcing, “I’m talking about the fact that I wasn’t a maiden when I became your wife,” or when she declares, “I’ve always known, Kristin, that you’ve never been very fond of me.”

  A particular poignancy attends the reading of very long novels, especially those which, for all their undeniable charms, you’re unlikely to read again. Weeks, even months of your internal life are given over to some new cast of characters, who vaporize when the book is closed.

  A few such novels may escape this tinge of melancholy. I felt little of it while reading for the first time Don Quixote or David Copperfield or Vanity Fair or In Search of Lost Time, since I never doubted I’d one day return to them. But it’s the fate of most long books never to be revisited. I don’t suppose I’ll ever get around to rereading John Hersey’s The Call, though it’s the only novel I’ve ever read that convincingly situated me in China, or Shimazaki To-son’s Before the Dawn, even if it deposited me deep in rural Japan during the Meiji restoration, or Austin Tappan Wright’s Islandia, although parting from its imaginary Thoreauvian country was a little like leaving the land of the lotos-eaters.

  Doubtless many of those readers who adored Kristin Lavransdatter in its original translation never got around to rereading it, and the story faded into a distant glimmering. If the trilogy’s plot embodies an ultimate stripping away of worldly concerns, as Kristin moves slowly but steadily from bodily to spiritual priorities, in readers’ memories a counterpart sort of paring may take place. Again, for most readers, the book’s political machinations—King Haakon and all the rest—probably fled the memory in rapid order, as did any strong feelings about Undset as a prose stylist. What lingered was a feeling of having been transported; what lingered was enchantment. Each time a woman approached me to say, “I once read that book,” she was responding to a literary gratitude so durable it insisted on being expressed to a stranger.

  What was another world has now found its way into another world: Nunnally’s new translation, with its cleaner motivations and phrasing, its nuanced balancing of the blunt and the taciturn. Throughout all the tribulations of her life, Kristin winds up being not merely a survivor but an explorer: her hardy soul is on a pilgrimage. It’s heartening to think of a new generation of readers following Kristin’s explorations, and in the process amassing memories so rich they might induce a stranger to approach a stranger and say, “I once read that book.”

  A NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION

  THIS TRANSLATION from the Norwegian is based on the first edition of Sigrid Undset’s epic trilogy, Kransen, Husfrue, and Korset, which appeared in 1920, 1921, and 1922, respectively. All of the novels were originally published in Oslo by H. Aschehoug & Company, which continues to publish Undset’s works in Norway today.

  The three volumes of Kristin Lavransdatter were translated into English in the 1920s, but the translators chose to impose an artificially archaic style on the text, which completely misrepresented Undset’s beautifully clear prose. They filled her novels with stilted dialogue (using words such as ’tis, ’twas, I trow, thee, thou, hath, and doth), and they insisted on a convoluted syntax.

  Nowadays the role of the translator is different. Accuracy and faithfulness to the original tone and style are both expected and required. In Norwegian Undset writes in a straightforward, almost plain style, yet she can be quite lyrical, especially in her descriptions of nature. The beauty of the mountainous Norwegian landscape is lovingly revealed in Undset’s lucid prose. In her research for Kristin Lavransdatter, she immersed herself in the customs and traditions of medieval Norway. She was meticulous about using the proper terms for clothing, housewares, and architectural features, but she did not force archaic speech patterns on her characters. To readers of the twenty-first century, the dialogue may sound slightly formal, but it is never incomprehensible.

  Misunderstandings and omissions also marred the English translation from the 1920s. One crucial passage in The Wreath was even censored, perhaps thought to be too sexually explicit for readers at the time. Most serious of all, certain sections of The Wife, scattered throughout the novel and totaling approximately eighteen pages, were deleted. Many are key passages, such as Kristin’s lengthy dialogue with Saint Olav in Christ Church, Gunnulf’s meditation on the mixture of jealousy and love he has always felt toward Erlend, and Ragnfrid’s anguished memory of her betrothal to Lavrans. I have restored all of these passages, which offer the reader essential insight into the underlying spiritual and psychological turmoil of the story. The Penguin Classics edition is thus the first unabridged English translation of Undset’s trilogy. Part of this translation has been published with the support of a grant from NORLA (Norwegian Literature Abroad).

  Throughout the text I have retained the original spelling of Norwegian names. The occasional use of the letter ö instead of ø in proper names is intentional—the former is used in Swedish names, the latter in Norwegian. The original Norwegian text contains thousands of dashes, which tend to impede rather than enhance the reading. In most cases I have chosen to replace the dashes with commas or semicolons, or, occasionally, to create separate sentences. I have also decided to keep the Norwegian masculine title “Herr” and the feminine title “Fru” rather than to translate them into the somewhat misleading English titles of “Sir” and “Lady.” Only those men who are clearly identified in the story as knights are given “Sir” as their title. Readers should note that Norwegian surnames were derived from the father’s given name, followed by either “-datter” or “-søn,” depending on the gender of the child. For example, Kristin’s mother is named Ragnfrid Ivarsdatter, while her mother’s brother is named Trond Ivarsøn. They are also referred to as Gjeslings, since they are descendants of the Gjesling lineage.

  It is a testament to the power of Sigrid Undset’s story that, in spite of a severely flawed early translation, Kristin Lavransdatter has been so beloved by generations of readers. I hope that with this new translation many more readers will now discover Undset’s magnificent story of a headstrong young woman who defies her family and faith to follow the passions of her heart.

  I: THE WREATH

  PART I

  J ØRUNDGAARD

  CHAPTER 1

  WHEN THE EARTHLY GOODS of Ivar Gjesling the Younger of Sundbu were divided up in the year 1306, his property at Sil was given to his daughter Ragnfrid and her husband Lavrans Bjørgulf søn. Before that time they had lived at Skog, Lavrans’s manor in Follo near Oslo, but now they moved to Jørundgaard, high on the open slope at Sil.

  Lavrans belonged to a lineage that here in Norway was known as the sons of Lagmand. It originated in Sweden with a certain Laurentius Östgötelagman, who abducted the Earl of Bjelbo’s sister, the maiden Bengta, from Vreta cloister and fled to Norway with her. Herr Laurentius served King Haakon the Old, and was much favored by him; the king bestowed on him the manor Skog. But after he had been in this country for eight years, he died of a lingering disease, and his widow, a daughter of the house of the Folkungs whom the people of Norway called a king’s daughter, returned home to be reconciled with her kinsmen. She later married a rich man in another country. She and Herr Laurentius had had no children, and so Laurentius’s brother Ketil inherited Skog. He was the grandfather of Lavrans Bjørgulfsøn.

  Lavrans was married at a young age; he was only twenty-eight at the time he arrived at Sil, and t
hree years younger than his wife. As a youth he had been one of the king’s retainers and had benefited from a good upbringing; but after his marriage he lived quietly on his own estate, for Ragnfrid was rather moody and melancholy and did not thrive among people in the south. After she had had the misfortune to lose three small sons in the cradle, she became quite reclusive. Lavrans moved to Gudbrandsdal largely so that his wife might be closer to her kinsmen and friends. They had one child still living when they arrived there, a little maiden named Kristin.

  But after they had settled in at Jørundgaard, they lived for the most part just as quietly and kept much to themselves; Ragnfrid did not seem overly fond of her kinsmen, since she only saw them as often as she had to for the sake of propriety. This was partially due to the fact that Lavrans and Ragnfrid were particularly pious and God-fearing people, who faithfully went to church and were glad to house God’s servants and people traveling on church business or pilgrims journeying up the valley to Nidaros.1 And they showed the greatest respect to their parish priest, who was their closest neighbor and lived at Romundgaard. But the other people in the valley felt that God’s kingdom had cost them dearly enough in tithes, goods, and money already, so they thought it unnecessary to attend to fasts and prayers so strictly or to take in priests and monks unless there was a need for them.

  Otherwise the people of Jørundgaard were greatly respected and also well liked, especially Lavrans, because he was known as a strong and courageous man, but a peaceful soul, honest and calm, humble in conduct but courtly in bearing, a remarkably capable farmer, and a great hunter. He hunted wolves and bears with particular ferocity, and all types of vermin. In only a few years he had acquired a good deal of land, but he was a kind and helpful master to his tenants.