Rediscovering Sigrid Undset
Boland, Maura
A NEGLECTED NOBEL-PRIZEWINNER Rediscovering Sigrid Undset MAURA BOLAND ONE DAY in 1900, a librarian in Oslo was surprised to receive a borrowing slip from a pretty eighteen-year-old secretary:...
...All fires burn out at last, thinks Kristin, as she approaches her journey's end...
...At the same time, she was opposed to any development which would undermine the position of wifp and mother, for she regarded the family, and especially the central role of the mother, as the nucleus of all civilization...
...Hers was an almost mystical ability to transcend time and space and make the past contemporary with the present...
...In describing the relationship between Kristin and Erlend, Sigrid Undset shows her remarkable insight into the nature of marriage...
...Another illuminating parallel is that between Erlend and his priest brother, Gunnulf, who shares Erlend's adventurous spirit but has channeled it into missionary zeal...
...But theirs is a difficult position...
...Kristin Lavransdatter had the musty, dusty 4ook of books which have lain too long on the shelves...
...Up to this point Sigrid Undset was an accomplished and successful writer...
...Her experience of life broadened, her work brought her into contact with people very different from those she had known in her childhood...
...Little is known about the marriage, but it appears to have been unhappy...
...Kristin's wedding day is overshadowed by remorse and fear for her unborn child...
...For as the cares of life oppress her, Kristin turns her anger against the one she loves most...
...In part three, Kristin and Erlend are living at Jorundgaard, which Kristin inherited on her father's death...
...This helps to account for her neglect in academic circles...
...She was also a great patriot...
...Though she had made a few excursions into the Middle Ages with The Story of Viga-Ljot and Vigdis (1909) and Tales of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table (1915), most of her early works are set in contemporary Oslo and concern woman's role in marriage and in society...
...With the help of black coffee and cigarettes, she would work far into the night after the children were in bed...
...and the medieval worldview had virtually become her own...
...her father's funeral train, which he plans himself, followed by his stallion bearing his armor and weapons, and two fat cows as gifts for the priests...
...Undset's medieval novels are different...
...But research alone is not enough to create a masterpiece...
...In this world, where human beings interbreed, beget new generations, and, loving their own flesh are impelled one to another by the body's lust, bitterness of heart and disappointed hopes must come as surely as the frost comes in autumn...
...All the characters in the novel are fully-realized human beings, from the archbishop down to the seven little Erlendssons, each of whom has his own distinct personality and his separate destiny...
...The Nazis burned her books and chopped up the desk at which she had written her famous novels...
...But in spite of her heartfelt repentance and good intentions, frequent quarrels spring up between husband and wife and their relationship slowly deteriorates...
...When at last he returns, to defend her against the charge that he is not the father of her last child, he is killed by an angry crowd...
...Her concern is the normal, not the grotesque, and she loves her characters in all their mortal fallibility...
...Above all, her belief in the old virtues of loyalty, moderation and a sense of responsibility seems decidedly out of step in a narcissistic age...
...To read one of them is to step into a world of truth and light...
...In 1912 Sigrid Undset married Anders Svarstad, a divorced artist with three children...
...There are relatively few principal characters, and these are nearly all related by blood or marriage...
...In fact, Kristin's besetting sin is pride, and a stubborn insistence that things must go her way...
...She had the honesty to hold a mirror up to human nature and look at it without equivocation...
...In the years that follow, Kristin occupies herself with the administration of Erlend's estate, which has fallen into decay, and the rearing of their seven sons...
...The neglect she has suffered, despite the reasons for it I suggested earlier, is surprising in an age of militant feminism, when obscure women artists—literary and otherwise—are being resurrected, and when women of high achievement are the focus of so much attention...
...Her reverence for motherhood is a recurrent theme: for example, in the short story "Thjodolf," Helene Johansen, a middle-aged fisherman's wife, finds happiness and meaning in her devotion to a young foster child...
...The suffragettes felt that Undset had betrayed the image of the emancipated woman...
...In the last analysis, Kristin Lavransdatter is a commentary on the meaning of life, and the sorrow which underlies all human existence: "It dawned on Kristin Lavransdatter in a new way that the interpreters of God's word were right...
...In a recent anthology of women's fiction, a modern critic says, ". . . Her religious Commonweal: 620 worldview is an embarrassment to critics who have established that nihilism is the only accurate description of the way things are in the post-Christian era...
...Although she always gave priority to her family responsibilities, she never stopped writing...
...She realizes what sin brings with it: one must tread others underfoot...
...George Eliot also did a vast amount of research for her novel Romola, which is set in Renaissance Florence, but her characters are unmistakably Victorians set adrift in an alien world...
...She was already disillusioned with Protestantism...
...In her loneliness Jenny has several affairs with men she does not love...
...Her youthful determination to win Erlend is transformed into ambition for her sons and a determination to provide for their futures...
...KRISTIN LAVRANSDATTER is one of the most magnificently alive characters in all literature...
...For several years she attended a progressive, liberallyoriented school, but soon became disillusioned with both liberalism and formal education...
...After a long struggle, Kristin manages to win her father's consent to the marriage, though he does not realize that she is pregnant and that she and her lover have driven Erlend's mistress to suicide...
...She manages to secure his release, but he has to forfeit Husaby...
...She needed to support herself as soon as possible, so she enrolled in a commercial college...
...She did not, however, attempt to re-create the style of the Middle Ages, as she had done, unconvincingly, in 7 November 1980: 621 The Story of Viga-Ljot and Vigdis, which is an imitation of the Old Icelandic sagas...
...Undset—the young Norwegian secretary who was to become one of the century's greatest novelists—is one of those writers whose works are more respected than read...
...She was the first woman commoner in one hundred years to receive this honor...
...The librarian confirmed my suspicion that today Sigrid MAURA BOLAND received her W.A...
...By now she was well along the road towards Christianity and her 1924 entry into the Catholic church...
...True, Kristin's love affair with Erlend plunged her into sin and guilt...
...Since her childhood, she knew that hers was a deeply divided nature: She is always psychologically consistent, though her objectives change over the course of her life...
...Undset invariably treats them with sympathy and understanding...
...But in her greatest works she concentrates on the individual's relationship to God and our eternal destinies...
...Oddly enough, her short stories are more uniformly successful than her early novels...
...Her books were translated into the major European languages and were bestsellers in Europe and the United States...
...It finds a place for murder, witchcraft, political intrigue—the violent deeds of a violent age—as well as poetry and romance...
...It was first published as three separate novels: The Garland (Kransen) in 1920...
...Jenny consolidated the author's growing fame...
...Unlike many of her famous contemporaries—Proust, Mann, Joyce, Virginia Woolf—she used the conventional narrative form and experimented with no new literary techniques...
...The central theme—the tension between the will of God and the will of man—is kept to the foreground by the use of numerous parallels, contrasts and cross-references...
...The life of the body was irremediably plagued with troubles...
...and The Cross (Korset) in 1922...
...Kristin's agonizing first childbirth in the great hall at Husaby, with all the ladies of the parish in attendance as midwives...
...Undset was no determinist...
...After she received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1928, Sigrid Undset was world-famous...
...At fifteen, Kristin is betrothed by her father to Simon Andresson, the heir to a neighboring estate...
...After his death, life becomes increasingly empty for Kristin Lavransdatter...
...In her spare time, she laid the foundations for her writing career, acquiring an extensive knowledge of Shakespeare, the Elizabethan lyricists, Keats, Shelley, as well as Ibsen and other Norwegian writers...
...The sense of community, and the continuity of life is emphasized as Kristin lies in childbirth while her father lies on his deathbed...
...At twenty, she wrote a novel set in medieval Norway, but this was rejected with the advice that she try something modern instead...
...Erlend's attitude towards his illegitimate daughter, Margaret, forms an ironic parallel both to his own past behavior towards Kristin and to Kristin's father's attitude towards her...
...She enters a convent at Rein, intending to become a nun...
...The novel sometimes gives the impression that Kristin's lifelong spiritual struggle is the direct result of the wrongdoing surrounding her marriage...
...and, though she repents and is forgiven, her spiritual condition remains precarious...
...Above all, she read everything she could find pertaining to her first love, the Middle Ages: history, sagas, ballads, romances, the German minnesingers...
...But there are other factors at work, as Erlend knows well: "It is not from holiness, Kristin, that you are always tearing open these old sins of ours, but it is to have a weapon to use against me every time I oppose you in anything...
...Her first published book was Mrs...
...While Jenny is a sympathetic character, she is always shown as a victim of her own weakness, not of society...
...Kristin's anguish of soul is contrasted to the peace of mind enjoyed by her father, who has always lived in conformity with God's will...
...She is even proud of the fact that she has grown old and bitter in the process...
...She accepts her father's choice, but when she meets Erlend Nilulausson, a dark and handsome knight with a bad reputation, she realizes that he, not Simon, is the man of her dreams...
...When the Nazis invaded Norway in 1940, her son, Anders, was killed in action and she herself forced into exile in the United States, where she worked tirelessly for the liberation of Norway...
...In addition to Kristin Lavransdatter and The Master ofHestviken, the medieval epics which are her acknowledged masterpieces, she wrote seven novels set in contemporary Norway, another, Madame Dorthea, set in the eighteenth century, several volumes of short stories, translations of Icelandic sagas, as well as .numerous articles, essays and book reviews...
...Her work has appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer and other newspapers...
...One unifying factor is the common faith shared by master and servant, king and priest...
...For the next ten years she worked as a secretary in Oslo...
...A NEGLECTED NOBEL-PRIZEWINNER Rediscovering Sigrid Undset MAURA BOLAND ONE DAY in 1900, a librarian in Oslo was surprised to receive a borrowing slip from a pretty eighteen-year-old secretary: the book requested, Heilagra Manna Sogur, a book of legends about holy men and women, had never been out on loan since its publication...
...It was not always so...
...Jenny caused an outcry in feminist circles...
...some, like "Simonsen," are classics...
...All the standard ingredients of romance are present as the two pledge their eternal love...
...He is perfectly suited to the chivalric life of heroic deeds, totally unfitted for the domestic life she envisions for him...
...These tendencies lead her repeatedly into acts of anger, cruelty, and revenge...
...But since her death in 1949, interest in Sigrid Undset has declined and very little critical attention has been given to her books...
...Once again, she and Erlend grow apart, and finally Erlend can bear no more and moves to an abandoned shack in the mountains...
...As a child she read widely in Scandinavian and world history, and she loved the Old Norse and Icelandic sagas long before she could fully understand them...
...All were fairly well received and Undset was able to give up her office job...
...7 November 1980: 623...
...For several decades there had been a great revival of interest in Norway's Middle Ages...
...IT would BE gratifying to think that the recent publication of Kristin Lavransdatter in paperback (by Bantam) for the first time may signal a renewal of interest in Sigrid Undset...
...In doing her research, Undset had access to primary sources and also corresponded regularly with such leading scholars as Fredrik Paasche...
...Three children were born to them: two sons, Anders and Hans, and a mentally-retarded daughter, Maren Charlotte...
...In many ways, Kristin is an admirable woman: devoted to her children, kind to the servants, generous to the poor, deeply regretful of the wrongs she did her parents...
...She resents Erlend's insouciance, his indifference to fortune, even the very love their children bear him...
...She never accepts the changing circumstances of life, but is bent on conquering fate by the power of her will...
...I thought of this not long ago when I went to a library to borrow some books by Sigrid Undset...
...Worse, Erlend has been exiled for living in adultery and has two children by his mistress, Eline Ormsdatter...
...The rest were in the stacks and I checked the dates: none had been out since 1954...
...Surely Sigrid Undset ranks as a woman of high achievement...
...Her range as writer was vast, her knowledge of history and literature encyclopedic...
...But his love for her is never in doubt: "You know well, Kristin—whether you come by night or by day—whether I wait for you for a long time or a short time—I shall always welcome you as though you were the Queen of Heaven come down to my croft from the skies...
...It is the material of tragedy—and divine comedy...
...Many live in a spiritual vacuum and find their lives unrewarding...
...Erlend accepts his changed fortunes gracefully enough, but once again Kristin finds herself unfairly burdened as she tries to preserve her inheritance for her sons...
...But there is no sharp break in her thought before and after her conversion...
...Her first important novel, Jenny, was published in 1911...
...We can draw our own conclusions...
...The conscientious Simon Andresson, whom Kristin rejects and who marries her younger sister, is constantly compared to Erlend, the man she chose herself: it is Simon who sustains her in many an hour of need...
...But Kristin Lavransdatter herself remains the dominant figure, as well as the most complex...
...Marta Oulie (1907), a short modern novel on the theme of marital infidelity . It was followed by a play, In the Gray Light of Dawn, and a collection of short stories, The Happy Age...
...Then there is her moral vision...
...She was the devoted mother of three children and three stepchildren...
...IN Kristin Lavransdatter Sigrid Undset demonstrates an epic sweep and power worthy of Tolstoy...
...In 1919, she moved to Lillehammer in the valley of Gudbrandsdal, the scene of the opening section of Kristin Lavransdatter...
...But he remains the man she married: adventurous, courageous in war, thoughtless and selfish in many ways, but kindhearted, too, and totally lacking in malice...
...We are introduced to the ordinary routine of medieval life as the farmers go about their sowing and reaping, the priests tend their flocks, and the nobles discuss affairs of state...
...When the Black Death breaks out she devotes herself to the sick and dying, but she, too, becomes a victim of the plague...
...If she were Juliet, she would commit suicide in the first part of the trilogy, when her youthful raptures are spent and her uncertain fate lies in the hands of her father...
...eventually she commits suicide...
...Also characteristic is the author's frank treatment of female sexuality...
...But Kristin does what few romantic heroines have been allowed to do: she lives on, grows old, and concerns herself with the fate of her soul...
...But, ultimately, it is her keen penetration into the hearts and souls of human beings that makes Sigrid Undset one of the Commonweal: 622 greatest of novelists...
...The book is typical of Undset's early period...
...But too often her good deeds spring from unpleasant motives...
...In fact, she sympathized with women who had to fight for their social and economic rights...
...But the work is not a tragedy...
...and the horror of the Black Death, which swept through Europe in 1349 and which claims the lives of Kristin and her two oldest sons who have become monks...
...She is also one of the great romantic heroines—but one with a difference...
...The early twentieth century was an auspicious time to work on Kristin Lavransdatter and The Master of Hestviken...
...However, to find her true literary voice she had to return to the Middle Ages, the period for which she had such an extraordinary affinity...
...As she kneels at the wedding Mass, falsely wearing the golden garland of maidenhood, she vows to do penance when her child is born...
...But there is unity in all this diversity...
...Her themes remain the same, but from now on they are viewed in the light of Christian orthodoxy...
...The great dramatic events of the novel are vividly described, with Undset's use of the concrete detail creating a splendid illusion of reality: the suicide-murder of Eline Ormsdatter, aided and abetted by Erlend's aund, lady Aaschild, who is suspected of witchcraft and who shares many of her nephew's less palatable traits...
...King Haakon VII conferred on her the Grand Cross of the Order of Saint Olav...
...Although, under Canon Law, Kristin cannot be forced to marry against her will, her betrothal cannot be broken without grave embarrassment to her father...
...Only when Erlend is sentenced to death for treason does Kristin realize how much she loves him...
...Though she does not idealize her characters, neither does she place undue emphasis on evil as, for example, Mauriac does...
...But they are determined to marry, no matter what the cost...
...If she were Anna Karenina (whom she resembles even more) she would do it in the second part, after her mature passion has turned to bitterness and resentment...
...At fifteen, she decided against attending a university and also gave up her early ambition to be a painter...
...The Mistress of Husaby (Husfrue) in 1921...
...In spite of her disloyalty and intransigence, he had held her fast in his service, and beyond lies freedom and salvation...
...Her life was as impressive as her works...
...By 1919 they had separated, and the marriage was annulled when Undset entered the Catholic church in 1924...
...Although she herself regarded The Master ofHestviken, a medieval tetralogy published in 1925 and 1927, as superior, Kristin Lavransdatter was the work that made Sigrid Undset world-famous...
...in literature from Columbia University...
...Sigrid Undset was born in Denmark in 1882 but grew up in Oslo where her father, the internationally-famous Norwegian archaeologist Ingvald Undset, was associated with the University Museum...
...The trilogy spans nearly fifty years, ranging over most of fourteenth-century Norway: it encompasses the whole of life, the whole of society and the full spectrum of human emotions...
...In many of her writings, Undset expresses her views of marriage as a sacrament but not necessarily a lifelong romance...
...We see Kristin shaking lice from the bed-clothes at Husaby, embroidering a shirt for Erlend, preparing reindeer for a wedding feast, nursing her children through scarlet fever...
...Sigrid Undset was a true novelist, not a religious propagandist, as is sometimes charged...
...Her characters are ordinary, middle-class people: young housewives, office girls living in boarding houses, aging spinsters consoling themselves with imaginary love affairs...
...Jenny, a struggling young artist, cannot find total fulfillment in her work and longs for a man she can love and respect...
...As she lies on her deathbed, Kristin knows that "a handmaid of God had she been...
...Much of the action takes place in the context of daily work...
Vol. 107 • November 1980 • No. 20
