Undset’s love of nature so permeated her world view that it became synonymous with the truth she sought to portray in her novels, the truth that her mother had enjoined her to write about. In a speech given during the 1940s she explained what she meant by a “true novel”:
“We often see the word “novel” defined as the opposite of “facts.” And of course those kinds of novels do exist. But even those types of novels do not necessarily have to be the opposite of “truth.” Facts may be true, but they are not truths -- just as wooden crates or fence posts or doors or furniture are not “wood” in the same way that a forest is, since it consists of the living and growing material from which these things are made. … The true novel, if you understand what I mean by that term, must also make use of facts, but above all it must be concerned with the truth that lies behind them -- the wild mountains that are the source of the “tame” cobblestones of the pavement or the artistically hewn stones in a work of sculpture; the living forest which provides timber for the sawmills and pulp for the billions of tons of paper which we use and misuse. Then these facts will be of secondary importance to the author … they are not original; they originate from something else.”
Sigrid Undset had a remarkable ability to see beyond the “facts,” to portray the lives of her characters in realistic fashion and yet with great psychological insight. She herself said that “to be a writer is to be able to live lives that are not one’s own.” In Kristin Lavransdatter, the meticulously researched details of medieval life provide a rich backdrop for the narrative. But for modern readers, the power of the novel lies not so much in the authenticity of detail as in the author’s deep understanding of the passions and torments of the human heart.
There is a lot to like here -- especially in the idea that novels (and Sigrid Undset novels, to be precise) contain truth even though they are, of course, made-up stories about made-up people. And not just any old truth, but deep psychological truths about the passions and torments of the human heart, truths that have the power to speak out across centuries and cultures.
She Beckoned To Me With A Wreath of Gold
And that’s just what we find in The Wreath. It takes place in Norway in the 1300s, but its opening part is almost magical in its ability to both stay rooted in that world and to root young Kristin Lavransdattar in our hearts. Here, she has wandered away from her traveling party, following a horse named Guldsvein and a group of other horses out into the wider countryside and away from the protective oversight of her father, Lavrans, and his people.
All around grew such a profusion of the finest pink tufts of flowers called valerian; they were much redder and more beautiful here next to the mountain stream than back home near the river. Then Kristin picked some blossoms and carefully bound them together with blades of grass until she had the loveliest, pinkest, and most tightly woven wreath. The child pressed it down on her hair and ran over to the pool to see how she looked, now that she was adorned like a grown-up maiden about to go off to a dance.
It is the titular wreath -- in actuality and in allegory -- representing innocence, and worn in her culture by virgins of noble birth. And, at the moment she dons it, and begins to admire and imagine herself…
She bent over the water and saw her own dark image rise up from the depths and become clearer as it came closer. Then she saw in the mirror of the stream that someone was standing among the birches on the other side and leaning towards her. Abruptly she straightened up into a kneeling position and looked across the water. At first she thought she saw only the rock face and the trees clustered at its base. But suddenly she discerned a face among the leaves -- there was a woman over there, with a pale face and flowing, flaxen hair. Her big light-gray eyes and her flaring, pale-pink nostrils reminded Kristin of Guldsvein’s. She was wearing something shiny and leaf-green, and branches and twigs hid her figure up to her full breasts, which were covered with brooches and gleaming necklaces.
Kristin stared at the vision. Then the woman raised her hand and showed her a wreath of golden flowers and beckoned to her with it.
A second wreath of flowers, not pink but gold, in the hands of this strange woman of the wilderness, beckoning to the pure and innocent girl.
Behind her, Kristin heard Guldsvein whinny loudly with fear. She turned her head. The stallion reared up, gave a resounding shriek, and then whirled around and set off up the hillside, making the ground thunder. The other horses followed. They rushed straight up the scree, so that rocks plummeted down with a crash, and branches and roots snapped and cracked.
Then Kristin screamed as loud as she could. “Father!” she shrieked. “Father!” She sprang to her feet and ran up the slope after the horses, not daring to look back over her shoulder. She clambered up the scree, tripped on the hem of her dress, and slid down, then climbed up again, scrabbling onward with bleeding hands, crawling on scraped and bruised knees, calling to Guldsvein in between her shouts to her father -- while the sweat poured out of her whole body, running like water into her eyes, and her heart pounded as if it would hammer a hole through her chest; sobs of terror rose in her throat.
“Oh, Father, Father!”
She is terrified -- terrified of something she doesn’t but which Guldsvein instinctively understands to be dangerous -- and her instinct is to return to the protection of her father, the man who rules their small community and her life.
Then she heard his voice somewhere above her. She saw him coming in great leaps down the slope of the scree -- the bright, sunwhite scree. Alpine birches and aspens stood motionless along the slope, their leaves glittering with little glints of silver. The mountain meadow was so quiet and so bright, but her father came bounding toward her, calling her name, and Kristin sank down, realizing that she was now saved.
“Sancta Maria!” Lavrans knelt down next to his daughter and pulled her to him. He was pale and there was a strange look to his mouth that frightened Kristin even more; not until she saw his face did she realize the extent of her peril.
“Child, child…” He lifted up her bloody hands, looked at them, noticed the wreath on her bare head, and touched it. “What’s this? How did you get here, little Kristin?”
“I followed Guldsvein,” she sobbed against his chest. “I was so afraid because you were all asleep, but then Guldsvein came. And then there was someone who waved to me from down by the stream…”
“Who waved? Was it a man?”
“No, it was a woman. She beckoned to me with a wreath of gold -- I think it was a dwarf maiden, Father.”
A dwarf maiden. A mythic creature of her folklore. Something she has been taught to fear. What else, who else could it have been?
“Jesus Christus,” said Lavrans softly, making the sign of the cross over the child and himself.
He helped her up the slope until they came to the grassy hillside; then he lifted her up and carried her. She clung to his neck and sobbed; she couldn’t stop, no matter how much he hushed her.
Soon they reached the men and Isrid, who clasped her hands together when she heard what had happened.
“Oh, that must have been the elf maiden -- I tell you, she must have wanted to lure this pretty child into the mountain.”
“Be quiet,” said Lavrans harshly. “We shouldn’t have talked about such things the way we did here in the forest. You never know who’s under the stones, listening to every word.”
He pulled out the golden chain with the reliquary cross from inside his shirt and hung it around Kristin’s neck, placing it against her bare skin.
“All of you must guard your tongues well,” he told them. “For Ragnfrid must never hear that the child was exposed to such danger.”
Ragnfrid is Lavrans’s wife and Kristin’s mother and, like Lavrans, she would know the kind of danger that Kristin was actually in, and it had nothing to do with dwarves or elf maidens. The woman Kristin saw was Aashild Gautesdatter, whom Wikipedia describes as “a wise woman skilled in magic and the healing arts.” Allegorically, she is Mother Nature, someone free to follow her own will, and she will become one of the poles -- opposite the structured role demanded by Kristin’s father and faith -- that will shape the rest of Kristin’s story in The Wreath.
Her Inheritance of Health and Beauty and Love
Kristin Lavransdatter -- Lavrans’s daughter, named so in the convention of her place and time -- will come to question the cross that Lavrans protectively places around her young neck, question it and the world it is supposed to represent. Not because she wants to do evil, but because, like Aashild Gautesdatter, she feels an inner truth that seems to speak with more force than the convoluted myths that frame the path set out for her. Here, she is speaking with a monk visiting her village, Brother Edvin, who is busy painting religious pictures for their church.
In another painting the Virgin Mary sat with the Christ child on her knee. He had put one hand up under his mother’s chin, and he was holding an apple in the other. With them stood Saint Sunniva and Saint Kristina. They were leaning gracefully from the hips, their faces a lovely pink and white, and they had golden hair and wore golden crowns.
Brother Edin gripped his right wrist with his left hand as he painted leaves and roses in their crowns.
“It seems to me that the dragon is awfully small,” said Kristin, looking at the image of the saint who was her namesake. “It doesn’t look as if it could swallow up the maiden.”
“And it couldn’t, either,” said Brother Edvin. “It was no bigger than that. Dragons and all other creatures that serve the Devil only seem big as long as we harbor fear within ourselves. But if a person seeks God with such earnestness and desire that he enters into His power, then the power of the Devil at once suffers such a great defeat that his instruments become small and impotent. Dragons and evil spirits shrink until they are no bigger than goblins and cats and crows. As you can see, the whole mountain that Saint Sunniva was trapped inside is so small that it will fit on the skirt of her cloak.”
“But weren’t they inside the caves?” asked Kristin. “Saint Sunniva and the Selje men? Isn’t that true?”
Kristin is trying to understand the myths that she has been taught in their literal form -- that Saint Kristina was actually swallowed by a dragon, and that Saint Sunniva and an entourage of men were found buried in a mountain cave. And how does Brother Edvin respond to this rational examination?
The monk squinted at her and smiled again.
“It’s both true and not true. It seemed to be true for the people who found the holy bodies. And it seemed true to Sunniva and the Selje men, because they were humble and believed that the world is stronger than all sinful people. They did not imagine that they might be stronger than the world because they did not love it. But if they had only known, they could have taken all the mountains and flung them out into the sea like tiny pebbles. No one and nothing can harm us, child, except what we fear and love.”
“But what if a person doesn’t fear and love God?” asked Kristin in horror.
The monk put his hand on her golden hair, gently tilted her head back, and looked into her face. His eyes were blue and open wide.
“There is no one, Kristin, who does not love and fear God. But it’s because our hearts are divided between love for God and fear of the Devil, and love for this world and this flesh, that we are miserable in life and death. For if a man knew no yearning for God and God’s being, then he would thrive in Hell, and we alone would not understand that he had found his heart’s desire. Then the fire would not burn him if he did not long for coolness, and he would not feel the pain of the serpent’s bite if he did not long for peace.”
Kristin looked up into his face; she understood nothing of what he said.
With riddles. Brother Edvin responds with mysteries and riddles that defy rational examination.
Brother Edvin continued, “It was because of God’s mercy toward us that He saw how our hearts were split, and He came down to live among us, in order to taste, in fleshly form, the temptations of the Devil when he entices us with power and glory, and the menace of the world when it offers us blows and contempt and the wounds of sharp nails in our hands and feet. In this manner He showed us the way and allowed us to see His love.”
The monk looked down into the child’s strained and somber face. Then he laughed a little and said in an entirely different tone of voice, “Do you know who was the first one to realize that Our Lord had allowed Himself to be born? It was the rooster. He saw the star and then he said -- and all the animals could speak Latin back then -- he cried, ‘Christus natus est!’”
Brother Edvin crowed out the last words, sounding so much like a rooster that Kristin ended up howling with laughter. And it felt so good to laugh, because all the strange things that he had just been talking about had settled upon her like a burden of solemnity.
You can see Kristin trying to square the circle of the nonsense that Edvin offers her, but even Edvin realizes that it is hopeless and has to revert to the silliest stories he tells the youngest children to help them believe.
But Kristin is not a young child. She is growing into a young woman and she is wrestling with the emotions and passions that are beginning to manifest within her heart. She doesn’t want the life that has been prescribed for her -- prescribed by her parents and most of all by her father -- to wed as they bid or to enter the convent and take her vows of chastity. At one point her younger sister, Ulvhild, who has been crippled by a childhood accident, falls and hurts herself, and in her love and sympathy for her sister Kristin has a moment of clarity.
She placed Ulvhild on the bed which the sisters had shared ever since Kristin had grown too old to sleep with her parents. Then she took off her own shoes and lay down next to the little one. She lay there and listened for the bell long after it had stopped ringing and the child was asleep.
It had occurred to her, as the bell began to peal, while she sat with Ulvhild’s little bloodied face in her hands that perhaps this was an omen for her. If she would take her sister’s place -- if she would promise herself to the service of God and the Virgin Mary -- then maybe God would grant the child renewed vigor and good health.
Kristin remembered Brother Edvin saying that these days parents offered to God only the crippled and lame children or those for whom they could not arrange good marriages. She knew her parents were pious people, and yet she had never heard them say anything except that she would marry. But when they realized that Ulvhild would be ill all her days, they at once proposed that she should enter a convent.
But Kristin didn’t want to do it; she resisted the idea that God would perform a miracle for Ulvhild if she became a nun. She clung to Sira Eirik’s words that so few miracles occurred nowadays. And yet she had the feeling this evening that it was as Brother Edvin had said -- that if someone had enough faith, then he could indeed work miracles. But she did not want that kind of faith; she did not love God and His Mother and the saints in that way. She would never love them in that way. She loved the world and longed for the world.
Kristin pressed her lips to Ulvhild’s soft, silky hair. The child slept soundly, but the elder sister sat up, restless, and then lay down again. Her heart was bleeding with sorrow and shame, but she knew that she could not believe in miracles because she was unwilling to give up her inheritance of health and beauty and love.
It is a momentous decision, choosing the world and its pleasures over fidelity to God, and by cultural extension, her community, family, and father.
The Hideous Deformity of Sin
In the middle section of the novel the plot unfolds along these lines. I’ll let Wikipedia provide the summary:
Despite being betrothed to a neighboring landowner's son, Simon Darre, Kristin falls in love with Erlend Nikulaussøn, from the estate of Husaby in Trøndelag. Erlend has been excommunicated by the Catholic Church for openly cohabitating with Eline, the wife of a prominent judge; Eline left her elderly husband to live with Erlend, flouting both religious and social law. They have had two children together, Orm and Margret, who have no legal rights since they were born of an adulterous relationship.
Erlend and Kristin begin a passionate romance which is sealed with Erlend's seduction of Kristin and their eventual complicity in Eline's death, both grievous sins in the eyes of Church and State. Lavrans forbids their relationship, but after three years of Kristin's defiance and the death of Ulvhild, he no longer has the strength to oppose Kristin. He consents to her marriage to Erlend. Erlend and Kristin are formally betrothed, but she becomes pregnant before the wedding.
The final part of the novel is aptly titled Lavrans Bjorgulfson, after Kristin’s father, since in it we largely see Kristin from his perspective. It is a perspective, as described above, that is beaten down and nostalgic for the things that were and might have been.
Married off -- that was what had happened to him, practically unconsulted. Friends … he had many, and he had none. War … it had been a joy, but there was no more war; his armor was hanging up in the loft, seldom used. He had become a farmer. But he had had daughters; everything he had done in his life became dear to him because he had done it to provide for those tender young lives that he held in his hands. He remembered Kristin’s tiny two-year-old body on his shoulder, her flaxen soft hair against his cheek. Her little hands holding on to his belt while she pressed her hard, round forehead against his shoulder blades when he went riding with her sitting behind him on the horse.
And now she had those ardent eyes, and she had won the man she wanted. She was sitting up there in the dim light, leaning against the silk pillows of the bed. In the glow of the candle she was all golden -- golden crown and golden shift and golden hair spread over her naked golden arms. Her eyes were no longer shy.
The father moaned with shame.
It is very much like Kristin cannot grow up in Lavrans’s eyes -- she cannot become a woman with her own life and her own desires -- because doing so threatens the world he has constructed, or which, more accurately and more painfully, has been constructed even for him. Undset does masterful work in showing us both perspectives, the willful daughter and the troubled father, and sometimes even more masterfully twists them into the willful father and troubled daughter.
She and Erlend knelt together during the wedding mass, but it was all like a hallucination: the candles, the paintings, the shining vessels, the priests dressed in linen albs and long chasubles. All those people who had known her in the past seemed like dream images as they stood there filling the church in their familiar festive garb. But Herr Bjorn was leaning against a pillar and looking at them with his dead eyes, and she thought that the other dead one must have come back with him, in his arms.
Herr Bjorn is the deceased husband of Aashild Gautesdatter, who is Erlend’s aunt and who is widely believed to have poisoned her late husband. It is with her guidance that Erlend and Kristin similarly calculate the death of Eline so that they can marry.
She tried to look up at the painting of Saint Olav -- he stood there, pink and white and handsome, leaning on his axe, treading his own sinful human form underfoot -- but Herr Bjorn drew her eyes. And next to him she saw Eline Ormsdatter’s dead countenance; she was looking at them with indifference. They had trampled over her in order to get here, and she did not begrudge them that.
She had risen up and cast off all the stones that Kristin had striven so hard to place over the dead. Erlend’s squandered youth, his honor and well-being, the good graces of his friends, the health of his soul -- the dead woman shook them all off. “He wanted me and I wanted him, you wanted him and he wanted you,” said Eline. “I had to pay, and he must pay, and you must pay when your time comes. When the sin is consummated it will give birth to death.”
The dead are mocking Kristin in this scene -- her own conscience manifesting them so that they can serve that purpose.
Kristin felt that she was kneeling with Erlend on a cold stone. He knelt with the red, singed patches on his pale face. She knelt beneath the heavy bridal crown and felt the crushing, oppressive weight in her womb -- the burden of the sin she was carrying. She had played and romped with her sin, measuring it out as if in a child’s game. Holy Virgin -- soon it would be time for it to lie fully formed before her, looking at her with living eyes, revealing to her the brands of her sin, the hideous deformity of sin, striking hatefully with misshapen hands at his mother’s breast. After she had borne her child, after she had seen the marks of sin on him and loved him the way she had loved her sin, then the game would be played to the end.
Kristin thought: What if she screamed now so that her voice pierced through the song and the deep, droning male voices and reverberated out over the crowd? Would she then be rid of Eline’s face? Would life appear in the dead man’s eyes? But she clenched her teeth together.
Holy King Olav, I call to you. Among all those in Heaven, I beg you for help, for I know that you loved God’s righteousness above all else. I beseech you to protect the innocent one who is in my womb. Turn God’s anger away from the innocent, turn it toward me. Amen, in the precious name of the Lord.
“My children are innocent,” said Eline, “yet there is no room for them in a land where Christian people live. Your child was conceived out of wedlock just as my children were. You can no more demand justice for your child in the land you have strayed from than I could demand it for mine.”
Holy Olav, I beg for mercy nevertheless, I beg for compassion for my son. Take him under your protection, then I will carry him to your church in my bare feet. I will bring my golden crown to you and place it on your altar, if you will help me. Amen.
Her face was as rigid as stone, she was trying so hard to keep herself calm, but her body trembled and shuddered as she knelt there and was married to Erlend.
There are no right answers here. Indeed, there is almost a kind of capriciousness about what is sin and what is sanctified in this world, and that tension is on full display here as Kristin wrestles with her conscience and the ghosts of lives past and those yet to come. In these final scenes of the novel, again simply the first part of a longer work, one has to wonder if it is the capriciousness itself that will in the end destroy her.
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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