Kristin Lavransdatter: Volume 2, The Wife—Sigrid Undset
After the happily ever after
The Wife, the second volume of the Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy by Sigrid Undset, came out in 1921, one year after the first volume. I read the 1999 translation by Tiina Nunnally.
Unlike in many romances, where the lovers marry and “live happily ever after, the end,” The Wreath concludes with Kristin marrying Erlend and another eight hundred pages to go. The Wife covers several years of their married life, a marriage which no one, including myself, expected to last. Commenters have described their marriage as unhappy, but I wouldn’t agree. Rocky, yes, but they obviously love each other despite the many reasons not to. And they stay together through their many troubles.
As with the first volume, this one focuses on the emotional lives of the characters, not just that of Kristin, but of several characters to different degrees. The Wreath had a monochromatic emotional tone, I thought, as Kristin’s hormones mowed down everything in their path. But when Erlend brings her north to her new home, his estate at Husaby, it doesn’t take long for her to see how badly he has neglected its management. Therewith, new depths of her character emerge. Arriving as she does, a stranger placed over a host of indolent servants as their new mistress, she realizes the only way to put things back into shape involves winning everyone’s allegiance. This she does, but, from here to the end of the volume, one big problem plagues her: everyone with eyes knows she had carried a child at her wedding. No matter how badly she and Erlend wish everyone’s memory of their sin to go away, it keeps surfacing. So her first hurdle at Husaby involves gaining the respect of the servants. She gradually wins their loyalty and keeps it through this child’s birth and that of the next half dozen.
I sincerely hoped that Undset would not try to keep my interest with four hundred pages of details about household management. I also feared she might take a lazy way out and turn Kristin into a Norwegian Madame Bovary or a Lady Chatterley. But Undset struck her own path. After all, one doesn’t get bored with a loose cannon like Erlend. No, even though Kristin doesn’t embark on a quest to save the world or find the treasure or rescue a kidnapped child, the action never flags. The birth of Kristin’s first child, for instance, does not go smoothly at all. Simon, the poor schmuck whom Kristin ditched in the last volume finally marries Ramborg, Kristin’s sister, and so becomes a part of the family anyway. Erlend flies off the handle when he finds his daughter from a previous marriage in bed with a local yokel and chops off his hand. And then an intrigue against the king puts Erlend in jail for treason. The book doesn’t lack action or excitement, but I don’t find a single, overarching action driving the plot forward. I do find a single, overarching personality, whose emotional growth through extraordinarily difficult circumstances in a distant time and place never loses my interest.
In the first volume, Undset displayed her impressive knowledge of rural life and property law in medieval Norway. In this volume, she starts off demonstrating her comfort with the minutia of common social life and inheritance law in that time, but then she also weaves historical figures and events into her tale. Magnus Eriksson had became king of both Norway and Sweden in 1319 at the age of three. Until Magnus came of age, Erling Vidkunsson and Knut Jonsson ruled the two countries. These historical figures play a prominent onstage role in this fiction. When our story takes place, Magnus has reached the age of fifteen and assumed the reins of power. However, at that time in history one does not come of age in Norway before twenty. So the historical Erling Vidkunsson leads an uprising and draws our fictional Erlend into it. Of course they call that sort of thing “treason” and it doesn’t usually set well with kings.
This trilogy belongs to Kristin, not Erlend, so we witness the unfolding of these momentous events in Norway’s history from the standpoint of a wife trying to hold together a family of six children and two stepchildren, while fending off suitors and managing the estate, between tempestuous visits from an impulsive and generally unreliable husband.
At a crucial moment in the story, while Kristin tries to sing one of the children back to sleep, Erlend wakes up from a dream of an anchored ship,
… black and sleek. rocking gently on the waves. There was an ungodly, delicious smell of sea and kelp.
His heart grew sick with longing. Now in the darkness of the night, he lay here in the guest bed and listened to the monotonous sound of the lullaby gnawing at his ear, he felt how strong his longing was. To be away from this house and the swarms of children who filled it, away from talk of farming matters and servants and tenants and children—and from his anguished concern for her, who was always ill and whom he always had to pity. […] He didn’t know how he would be able to live without her. But he didn’t feel able to live with her, either, not now. He wanted to flee from everything and breathe freely—as if it were a matter of life itself for him.
Jesus, my Savior—oh, what kind of a man was he! He realized it now, tonight. Kristin, my sweet, my dearest wife—the only time he had known deep, heartfelt joy with her was when he was leading her astray.
Insights like this spur the characters to growth. Erlend never loses his basic impulsiveness, but he develops self-control. Kristin never loses her basic solicitude but she learns firmness. Every mistake they make brings with it self-recrimination and guilt, but also another level of maturity. And, most importantly, they never escape their pasts. Their youthful mistakes haunt them and temper their judgment of others. However, not just Kristin and Erlend have pasts. Everyone in this novel, even the minor characters, carry heavy baggage with them, coloring everything they do and say. If any characters forget for the moment a misstep from long ago, others quickly remind them. So, in the same way that customs and laws circumscribed people’s choices in the first volume, personal history controls everyone’s character in this volume, that and the impersonal movement of world history.
Undset has maintained such a consistent tone throughout, despite her self-imposed limitations, I would call this a tour-de-force of modern realism. She states what happens, and what the characters feel, and leaves it at that. She does not judge, evaluate, or generalize. While she does let us into several characters’ minds, she only does so through indirect statements or through stream-of-consciousness passages like the one above. Thus, she never subjects us to unspoken monologues. If she ever needs characters to spill their guts or introduce a complication, she can have them drink too much ale and then they’ll say or do something they can regret for the rest of their lives. She doesn’t use metaphors or similes other than when the characters themselves do. She never lectures her readers on history or the meaning of archaic terms or holy days. If characters would not naturally offer such information to each other in real dialogue, we just have to look it up ourselves. The translator helps us a lot with a couple of maps and a handful of well chosen endnotes. But we have a much easier time researching all this background than did the audiences who first encountered her work.
This volume has kept my interest very much alive, so I look forward to finishing the trilogy this week.
Next up: Kristin Lavransdatter: The Cross.
Amazon links to works mentioned in this post.
Kristin Lavransdatter, the complete trilogy in one volume
As separate volumes:
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