The Triumph of Sigrid Undset
Cransen, Carl
THE TRIUMPH OF SIGRID UNDSET By CARL CRANSEN SIGRID UNDSET is a new name in Scandinavian literature, reaching fame at a period coincident with the war and the years immediately following,...
...In that story Miss Undset makes such an idealistic refuge possible and allows the love of the elderly man to turn into protection of the young girl...
...Kristin finds it only in toilsome efforts and in the service of high principles...
...Her first birth with its excruciating sufferings, described with almost brutal realism, leaves her with feelings of bitterness toward Erlend...
...Jenny, hailed as Sigrid Und-set's first great and remarkable novel, was published in 1911...
...Already in 1902 she had plans for a novel from the middle of the fourteenth century...
...A year later she was able to give up her office work, and with the aid of a stipend made a journey over Germany, Italy, and France...
...The vast barren stretches, the birch forests, the meadows, and the farmhouses, which Sigrid Undset knows so well and depicts so realistically, are the same today as they were in the days of King Magnus Erikson...
...Subsequently, there is a reverse in her stage career, which makes her seriously doubt the reality of her talent...
...This richness in detail is of particular value in her mediaeval novels where it aids in the reconstruction of the historical setting...
...But she is safely anchored in her faith, which now inspires her to deeds of heroism...
...But in dealing with her problems Miss Undset never loses sight of the real...
...Although her literary career had begun prior to the war, Sigrid Undset was comparatively little known before that unhappy epoch...
...In her distress she seeks refuge in Helge's father, a forgotten artist, who, although devoid of talent, still holds the glamor of a past ideal...
...Rose mistakes wounded pride for love, and they are married...
...Rose still clings to her husband because she wants motherhood...
...Then, at a chance meeting, Helge, not knowing what has happened, forces his attentions upon her and conquers her physically...
...But Torkil and Rose are distinctly the select few...
...her artistic adjustment is destroyed...
...Sigrid Undset's first literary production of more than amateurish value, a novel entitled Fru Marta Oulie, appeared in 1907...
...Kristin Lavransdatter is a novel in three volumes published in 1920, 1921, and 1922, respectively...
...Her various female characters show a marked similarity—they are heavy, serious, and never happy...
...It is the great masterpiece in Sigrid Undset's writings and easily one of the greatest in Scandinavian literature...
...It was followed in 1908 by Den lykkelige Alder (The Happy Age) a collection of stories which already show her transition to more pure realism...
...In 1911 she undertook a second journey, at the outset of which she married the well-known Norwegian painter, Anders Svarstad...
...She had always maintained a special interest in this era and had made profound studies in the history of Norse law and the theology of the middle-ages...
...This is best understood if one assumes that Miss Undset has written from introspective experience and portrayed her own development in her successive works, which assumption would be confirmed by the fact that in 1925, soon after the completion of her mediaeval masterpiece, she became a convert to the Catholic Church...
...He wants the ideal situation or nothing...
...At the marriage, to which Lavrans gives unwilling consent, she wears the virginal wreath although she has forfeited the right to it...
...Then comes temptation...
...In the final scenes of the book the plague ravages the country, and Kristin receives a new cross in the death of her children, her last real attachment to life...
...Uni realizes that great, passionate happiness comes seldom and is transient, and that motherhood is a sufficient source of lasting contentment even when worldly ambition is crushed and romance dead...
...Vaaren presents the problem from an entirely new angle...
...Kristin and Erlend grow further apart...
...Their relationship has consequences, Jenny realizes her misstep and flees...
...The same situation is found in En Fremmed • (A Stranger) in Den lykkelige Alder...
...She was born in Denmark in 1882, her father being the noted Norwegian archaeologist, Dr...
...The following year saw from her pen a new collection of short stories entitled Fattige Skjaebner (Poor Fates...
...It is a desperate flight from the reality which has disappointed her to the nearest obtainable, yet feeble representative of her childhood's safe father ideal...
...Here Miss Undset has departed from the average, the usual, and has selected two ideal characters, Rose and Torkil, who struggle heroically with their love and finally find one another...
...his picture is drawn with all the manly virtues of an ideal father and master of a household...
...The vision of Brother Edvin and Master Gunnulf's spiritual discourses enhance the Catholic atmosphere of the volume...
...And the social and economic aspects of peasant life have changed little in Norway since the fourteenth century...
...But in the course of her writings they undergo a gradual development to a more definite solution of their common problem...
...Miss Undset's main theme is nearly always the problems of young womanhood in facing the vital issues in life, and one feels that she deals with them largely from internal experience...
...Her characters are fully alive and present, their problems are still ours, and their external activities and speech are largely those we would expect among Norwegian farmers of today...
...Kristin knows that his reputation has suffered, not least because of illicit love affairs, yet she is irresistibly drawn to him and becomes his...
...she hesitates, but in the end she remains steadfast for the sake of her children...
...This experience leaves her disgusted and in despair...
...To Erlend, life is ever a round of adventure...
...Kristin appears as mistress on her husband's estate in the second volume entitled Husfrue (The Mistress of Husaby) which also tells the story of her disillusionment...
...It had been eighteen years in preparation...
...she always remains firm on earth...
...Erlend stands in sharp contrast with Lavrans...
...She escapes her dilemma in a final flight from all reality...
...Torkil's firmness and self-denial for a high ideal, together with the violence of his passion which Rose feels in the stormy scene preceding their separation, transform him before ker vision, and In the course of time the new Torkil she has glimpsed grows into the image of her ideal...
...Its characters are painted with exquisite charm, and its theme, though realistic, breathes an idealism as rare as it is true...
...The Poor Fates are the failures in life, either of the easy-going, ne'er-do-well type like Simonsen, whose picture is a masterpiece...
...Two later collections, appearing in 1917 and 1918 respectively, are entitled Splint en av Troldspeilet (A Fragment of the Magic Mirror) and De kloge Jomfruer (The Wise Virgins...
...Erlend seeks honor in the glamor of adventure...
...he is her joy and ideal...
...Her mother was Danish...
...Uni Hirsch-Hjelde, whose story begins in Den lykkelige Alder and is continued in Splinten av Troldspeilet, the most living, perhaps, of all Sigrid Undset's creations, solves her problem differently...
...It is in Jenny, however, that she plunges headlong into reality...
...In the final volume, Korset (The Cross) it has come to open struggle between man and wife—it is a struggle for honor...
...The broadening influences of these travels are noticeable in her subsequent works...
...Two factors in Norwegian life contribute to make possible this merging of past and present...
...A collection of poems, Ungdom (Youth) the material of which is drawn from the poorer quarters of Oslo and similar small Norwegian towns, had seen the light in 1910...
...Norway's nature has not lent itself to remodelling by human hands...
...he is the dashing, romantic adventurer who lacks the more sturdy virtues valuable in a man, but easily wins a woman's heart...
...The first volume, entitled Kransen (The Bridal Wreath) deals with Kristin's childhood, youth, and first love...
...THE TRIUMPH OF SIGRID UNDSET By CARL CRANSEN SIGRID UNDSET is a new name in Scandinavian literature, reaching fame at a period coincident with the war and the years immediately following, when literary efforts suffered a prolonged depression in the northern countries...
...Torkil's love for Rose is established...
...It is a woman's safest adjustment to reality...
...She has grasped the spirit of the middle-ages in a manner remarkable for one brought up in Scandinavia, where every vestige of Catholic thought long since was swept away, and she has made it her own in its full width and depth, and fitted it masterfully in a realistic narrative...
...The attainment of her ideal seems now utterly hopeless, and her honesty rebels against the sham love which has ravaged her soul...
...The contrast between their natures also begins to reveal itself...
...During this period she alone seems to have had courage to create, undaunted by the depressing atmosphere about her, and her creation reaches the expression of the very heights of Norse epic power...
...Uni believes that she loves her art above all things and breaks her engagement with her too matter-of-fact fiance, only to renew it and marry him when both realize the strength of their love...
...In the meantime, in 1914, another novel, Vaaren (Spring) came from the press...
...There is one striking feature in all of Sigrid Undset's works, a great richness in detail...
...Jenny is a young artist who, one might think, would be content with her art, but in the long run she is unable to sustain her high artistic sublimation...
...Love gradually dies out, and a few years of toilsome married life leaves her without romance...
...It is a story of an unhappy marriage, told with a somewhat artificial idealization which keeps the author from penetrating to the bottom of her subject...
...Braving death in her work of mercy she reorganizes the disrupted convent hospital, encourages and gathers the demoralized people, and so conquers the epidemic...
...But Lavrans Bj0rgulfss0n, her father, is the real hero in this volume...
...The climax comes when Kristin drives her returning husband from her home and curses him, only the next moment to clutch his dead body in her embrace when he falls, defending her against the mob which would punish her impiety...
...Miss Undset introduces an entirely new element in Kristin Lavransdatter, that of mysticism in a broad sense...
...If not the greatest, it is one of the most beautiful of Miss Undset's earlier writings...
...In Den lykkelige Alder she had spoken her heart through Charlotte Hedels, the "office rat" with a philosophy, and literary yearnings, who wishes to write of her town and its "respectable toilers," and who feels the desire comMarch 10, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 493 mon to her kind "to live one single moment with our whole being turned inward—into our own burning heart...
...But in Jenny she explodes her belief in the fine understanding of the elderly man...
...Torkil, despite his desire for her, insists that they separate since she does not love him...
...Their early happiness rests in part on Rose's expectancy of motherhood, but when the child is still-born, and this element is removed, both come to realize that they are separated at heart...
...She sees her whole battle with disease and superstition as one between good and evil, between the forces of God and those of the devil, and she rises to a victorious bearer of the light in her high religious sublimation...
...There are two scenes of outstanding merit—Kristin's pilgrimage to Nidaros to obtain the archbishop's absolution for her sin, and Lavran's death...
...Five years later her long-contemplated work appeared under the title, Kristin Lavransdatter...
...So the ideal situation is established, and they are permanently reunited...
...As a prelude she wrote, in 1909, Fortaellingen om Viga-Ljot og Vigdis (The Tale of VigaLjot and Vigdis) a love story from the Viking period, and in 1915, Fortaellinger om Kong Arthur og Ridderne av det runde Bord (Tales of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table) in which the classical story is rendered in easy flowing prose and the human element is emphasized...
...In due course of time she is sent to convent school in Nonnesaeter, having first been promised in marriage to Simon, in whom she is not interested, and there she manages to have trysts with Erlend, which lead to a romance and their engagement...
...she leaves him and moves to her paternal estate to continue her father's husbandry...
...Against an historical background Miss Undset plots a story with strong modern appeal...
...to Kristin it is the toilsome cares of home and motherhood, the constructive activities of prudent husbandry...
...or of the type of women who, for their very lack of the least bit of deviltry, fail to attract, and who in the end are content with the morsel of happiness they receive from dog-like submissiveness—the people, in a word, whom Miss Undset had come to know so thoroughly during her long years of commercial toil...
...Ingvald Martin Undset...
...and while he is prone to forget, she remembers all, broods over every misfortune and slight, and lets bitterness grow in her heart...
...At the dangerous age of twenty-eight she meets Helge, but their romance is shattered when she begins to discover his true, inferior nature...
...She soon moved with her parents to Oslo in Norway, where she grew up and received her education, first in the primary schools and thereafter in business college...
...In the end the hard years were not without fruit...
...In this situation their individual points of view show the contrast between man and woman...
...Young Kristin is her father's child...
...Her graduation in 1899 was followed by ten years' employment in Oslo business offices, during which time she used her leisure to read and write poetry and prose...
...The second phase of Sigrid Undset's writings are stories laid in the middle-ages...
Vol. 3 • March 1926 • No. 18
