Kristin Lavransdatter: Volume 1, The Wreath—Sigrid Undset

A tale of the farmer's daughter

Feb 05, 2024

Cubist-style painting of village in hilly terrain — AI-generated painting of Norwegian village

The Wreath, volume one of the Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy, came out in 1920 with the next two volumes following quickly in 1921 and 1922. The first English translation of The Wreath by Charles Archer and J. S. Scott appeared in 1923 and a second translation by Tiina Nunnally in 1997. The entire trilogy earned Undset the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1928, “principally for her powerful descriptions of Northern life during the Middle Ages.” The story takes place in Norway during the fourteenth century, and Undset does indeed describe rural life at that time with masterful skill.

This volume tells the story of Kristin’s childhood and youth, culminating in her marriage. Unlike most medieval tales, this contains no warfare, crusades, tournaments, castles, or any of the other trappings we might expect. Instead, Undset immerses us in village and farm life in a very cold climate, where the daily chores may include churning butter and brewing ale. Kristin’s father, Lavran, arranges her marriage, as was the custom, but Kristin feels little affection for her betrothed. She chooses to join a convent in Oslo for a year before coming back home to be married to the boring but kind Simon. While in the big city, however, the country girl falls in love with a dashing, somewhat older man, Erlend, and one thing leads to another, as so often happens in novels.

This work explores complex and conflicting emotions to an extent I’ve seldom seen apart from the novels of Henry James. Kristin’s world constrains her choices by its web of laws, customs, traditions, mores, and religious demands. She tries hard to be a good person by meeting the expectations of her family, her society, her church, and the secular law, but despite all those norms she can only live as one human among others, all of whom struggle with more or less success at virtuosity. She tries to abide by all the rules, but her love for Erlend leads her down a path condemned by all the world’s voices. I would not call her a strong woman, not in this volume at least, but she has an endurance and resilience that nothing can crush. She sins in many ways, but she does it from passion and without pride; and whenever she errs she suffers terrible guilt. She agonizes over the people she betrays and hurts. Every step she takes down the path to a certain damnation torments her, yet she endures and perseveres, weeping all the while.

The narrator takes no moral position in this novel. She describes what happens and what Kristin feels (and occasionally what other characters feel), but she never judges. As a result, I often wondered how I should feel about the central characters. Everyone, at one point or another, acts badly. But no one escapes the attendant feelings of guilt. And, most importantly, every character, no matter how self-righteous they might feel in the moment, never completely loses sight of the human dignity of those they have wronged. So while the narrator may never have come out and stated such, I saw an overarching message: we either learn to forgive or lose our own humanity.

The intense realism of this novel starkly contrasts with the Arthurian mythologizing we expect from medieval romances. For this reason, I dislike the Archer and Scott translation, which tries to mimic the language of Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur. Undset offers us not mythology but an honest psychological study of a woman crucified by her loves and allegiances. Nunnally’s approach doesn’t try to turn Kristin Lavransdatter into something else. For example, in a snatch of dialogue that Nunnally renders, “Oh yes, yes, […] this seems to be the best council […],” Archer and Scott write “Nay, but I do, I do, […] Methinks it is the best way.” Furthermore, the older translation deletes certain passages. Where Archer and Scott say “She sank back upon the hay …” [the ellipsis is theirs], Nunnally says, “She sank back into the hay with open arms and let Erlend do as he liked.” Harold Bloom, in speaking about the works of literature that make up the Western canon says, “When you read a canonical work for the first time you encounter a stranger, an uncanny startlement rather than a fulfillment of expectations.” Archer and Scott, in my opinion, tried to fulfill the English fiction-reader’s expectations, but Nunnally does not shield us from the uncanny.

For one example of this realism, I noticed the narrator hardly ever mentions fire. Almost every novel I’ve read about country life in cold weather belabors the central role played by the stove and the hearth in family life—the morning ritual of lighting the kitchen stove to warm the whole house, for instance. Undset, in contrast, rarely mentions hearths or stoves, and when she does, only in passing. The medieval Norwegian farm, apparently, consisted of several small buildings, rather than a single large house, and people seldom slept in the kitchen. Thus, I got the sense that people mostly stayed warm by lighting candles, working vigorously, or curling up with each other in bed under the blankets. I only noticed fire playing a prominent role when lightening struck a church and burned it down.

Undset came by her interest in medieval Norway honestly. Her father, a noted Norwegian archeologist and medievalist imparted a love of history and an appreciation of historic research, even though he died when Sigrid was only eleven. She later became an expert in the period she wrote about in this and other works.

The narrator neither judges nor generalizes, nor does she assume a contemporary audience. Thus, you will find no annoying scientific explanations or anachronistic similes. What few similes she uses mostly come from nature or farm life. In fact, despite the stark realism of the rest of the novel, the narrator describes a brief encounter of Kristin and a water sprite which the narrator sees no need to explain away. Such an uncanny encounter never repeats, but it does establish for the reader the uneasy coexistence of the Christianized world of town and village and the old, dangerous, untamed, pre-Christian world. This lets us know that human conventions make only a fragile barricade against the forces of nature, a theme that reemerges at the psychological level when Kristin’s mores fail to restrain her passion.

All in all, I really enjoyed this volume, and look forward this week to Volume 2: The Wife. I see no point in reading both translations at this time, as the earlier one seems contrary to the spirit of Undset’s work. I plan to continue with Nunnally’s translation.