Kristin Lavransdatter, Sigrid Undset

Kristin Lavransdatter, Sigrid Undset

I am so grateful to the Times Literary Supplement for broadening out my education! A little while back it had an article on Manzoni’s The Betrothed, describing it as Italy’s foundational novel and placing Manzoni almost alongside Dante in the Italian literary pantheon. To my shame, and in spite of a degree in literature from Cambridge, I had not only never read but not even heard of Manzoni. So I bought a copy and loved it. Yes, some elements of the plot are a bit creaky in a librettish kind of way, but the tone of the narration is amazingly engaging and a passionate faith burns throughout.

Now the same has happened with Sigrid Undset and Kristin Lavransdatter, the novel that won her the Nobel prize. Never heard if it or her – feature in the TLS – bought it – absolutely bowled over. There are deeply felt descriptions of nature, especially early on when Kristin goes up into the high mountains that surround her home for the first time, there’s acute psychological insight, wonderful dialogue and epic themes. It’s remarkable to follow Kristin growing up in a world where men seem to have all the agency, yet seeing that she retains her inner life and power throughout.

Undset has a very rare gift for describing spiritual experience. She goes right to the threshold of ineffability yet still finds authentic words and images. Here’s an extract from Kristin’s teenage meditations: it’s on p.118 of my Penguin edition published in 2005.

Kristin placed her candle on the altar of St Laurentius and knelt down on the prayer bench. She stared steadily into the flame as she said her Pater Noster and Ave Maria. Gradually the glow of the taper seemed to envelop her, shutting out everything else surrounding her and the candle. She felt her heart open up, brimming over with gratitude and promises and love for God and His gentle Mother – she felt them so near. She had always known that they saw her, but on this night she felt that it was so. She saw the world as if in a vision: a dark room into which a beam of sunlight fell, with dust motes tumbling in and out, from darkness to light, and she felt that now she had finally moved into the sunbeam.

She thought she would gladly have stayed in the quiet, night-dark church forever – with the few tiny specks of light like golden stars in the night, the sweet fragrance of old incense and the warm smell of burning wax. With herself resting inside her own star…

Kristin lay awake for a long time, but the deep current of sweetness which had borne her as she knelt in the church would not return. And yet she still felt its warmth inside her: she fervently thanked God, and sensed a feeling of strength in her spirit as she prayed for her parents and her sisters…

I think part of the effectiveness of this is that the spiritual content is thoroughly incarnated in and conveyed by the circumstances – the church interior, the candle flame, the smells of wax and old incense – while at the same time utterly transcending them: God manifesting Himself through, not in spite of, the materiality of time and place, like the bush, burning but not consumed in the transcendent flame. Thank you Lord for this extraordinary blend of longing and comfort, joy and pain, love and sorrow, of being overwhelmed and yet for the first time truly ourselves in “the deep current of sweetness” that is Your presence, all too rarely while it lasts, and yet still near, just a breath away.

It’s like an altered state of consciousness, as John Wimber put it, in which the things around us are still there, but they just don’t matter compared to the One Thing whose beauty both surpasses and gathers up everything else. For me this is the sunbeam into which Kristin has moved, which dims but does not negate her surroundings, and becomes the star in which she rests.

By contrast, Undset also presents an inversion of Kristin’s blossoming spirituality in her mother, Ragnfrid. Ragnfrid’s fastings and mortifications read like a sort of dark bargaining with God, a doomed attempt, not to enter more fully into what God wants, but to make God do what she wants. She worships a distant, disapproving God who withholds love. The prayers and fasts are about trying to find a lever by which this God can be manipulated. They are therefore more like expressions of hostility towards God than love for Him. As such they can only wound the soul. 

Undset was a Roman Catholic so it is to her credit that she is awake, not only to positive versions but also to those toxic states of faith which are always going to arise among broken human beings. There is a similar, though less embittered, manifestation in one of the nuns at the Convent in Oslo where Kristin is temporarily staying. Sister Cecilia’s religion is to make atonement for herself, through her own efforts, rather than to receive the atonement offered in Christ. The Mother Superior’s response is to make sure that all the nuns treat Cecilia with acceptance, love and honour: this is effective because it is follows the dynamic of grace, not works.

It turns out, many chapters later, that the root of Ragnhild’s bitterness lies in the rape she suffered as a young woman. To cover up their shame, the family arranged her marriage to the young and inexperienced Lavrans, who ever afterwards felt that she was not the woman of his choice but was thrust upon him. Though he sought to be an exemplary husband and always treated her respectfully, Lavrans’ lack of enthusiasm for her compounded her wounded self-worth. Because he never gave his heart to her, Ragnhild could only feel unloved and unlovely. A classic reaction of secrecy, uncommunicated feelings, guilt and self-loathing followed. On a very deep level she experiences Lavrans’ disengagement as rejection, intensified by the artifice of his niceness. So here are two desperately hurting people whose deepest need is clearly to reach out to each other but, because of their pain, are completely unable to do so. Neither is at fault. Both accuse themselves. 

Undset gradually unfolds all this with extraordinary insight and compassion. But she is leading us to a most beautifully related reconciliation (pages 544-50 of my Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition). They have now been married for 34 years and Lavrans is dying. He gives her a ring he has always kept for himself exclusively. Clearly this ring is symbolic of his heart, his deepest self, that innermost private being he has until now never shared. This is both a statement of sorrow and repentance, acknowledging the great wounding he has inflicted upon her by his coldness, but better, the communication of the love for which they are both starving:

With this last ring (referring back to the betrothal and wedding rings he gave before) she felt as if he were marrying her again. Now that she would soon sit beside his lifeless body, he wanted her to know that with this ring he was committing to her the strong and vital force that had lived in this dust and ashes.

Her heart felt as if it were breaking in her breast, bleeding and bleeding, young and fierce. From grief over the warm and ardent love which she had lost and still secretly mourned; from anguished joy over the pale, luminous love which drew her to the furthest boundaries of life on this earth. Through the great darkness that would come, she saw the gleam of another, gentler sun, and she sensed the fragrance of the herbs in the garden at the world’s end.

Undset seems to be describing the painful birth of agape, the divine love, through all the torments Ragnhild has endured in her quest for human love. Like Kristin’s experience of God’s presence in the church at Oslo, like the bush that burns and is not consumed, it does not negate but completes and heals the broken human love in which it took root.

For the author presents this poignant and moving story in deeply Christian terms: repentance, forgiveness, love. They go back in their minds to the church where they were married in the presence of God. They kneel before the crucifix, symbol of the terrible woundedness of love, and pray the evening prayers. Before they sleep, Ragnhild reflects that:

God had not forsaken her. In His mercy, He had heard her cries for help when she called on Him, as she sank more and more into her misery – even when she called without believing she would be heard. It felt as if the black sea were rushing over her, now the waves lifted her towards a bliss so strange and so sweet that she knew it would carry her out of life.

“Talk to me, Lavrans,” she implored him quietly. “I’m so tired.” Her husband whispered, “Venite ad me, omnes qui laborate et onerati estis. Ego reficiam vos.”

Undset clearly believes, as I do, that since God is love, and we are made in His image, then it is our great destiny to love and to be loved: and that because of this, nothing is so fulfilling and enriching for us as when love goes well, and nothing is so painful or destructive for us as when love goes badly.

Another reconciliation that takes place in this episode of Ragnhild and Lavrans’ love concerns her questioning why Lavrans seemed to take it so calmly, apparently at least, when she first told him another man had taken her before she became his. The thought of her wounded mind was that he could not have cared enough for her to be affected by her “betrayal.” But Lavrans explains what went through his mind on page 549: “I thought about all the times I had betrayed Christ.” We are both fallen, broken human beings, how could I berate or blame you, as you expected, when I am no better than you?

A great poignancy underlying these pages is that Lavrans is experiencing symptoms of the heart disease that, over the next couple of chapters, will kill him. He is, in various other matters, but especially in this most important matter, aiming at the Christian tradition of a good death: one in which, as far as possible, wrongs are set right, those who have been injured are asked for forgiveness, and forgiveness is offered to those who have caused injury, that Gospel peace and reconciliation are established. It is very bittersweet that Lavrans and Ragnhild are only able to establish this right at the end of their lives. It is very beautiful that they establish it at all.

I just want to conclude this long section on Lavrans and Ragnhild by commenting on Undset’s masterly use of symbolism. This quality is present throughout the novel but there’s a great example here. Lavrans arrives late one night after a deeply sorrowful parting from their daughter Kristin and sees a flicker of light at the window. His heart is warmed. The light of home clearly symbolises the home and the relationship they have shared together, for sure enough, it comes from Ragnhild, who is waiting up for him. There she is, mending his clothes. He takes a spool of the thread she is using, its spindle ornamented with the carving of a bird. He remembers carving it and others like it through their years together. It is damaged: he repairs it, taking out his knife and whittling it anew… The spool is the winding of their life together over the years, the knife is the pain that has accompanied it too much of the time, but this time there will be repair, not more pain. The clothes Ragnhild mends are Lavrans’ riding breeches, worn from many hours in the saddle – hours that probably took him away from her too many times… everything connects to the texture of their 34 years together. But it’s not an imposed symbolism. Each object is a symbol of their life together because it has been part of that life, the objects are themselves the texture of their joys and sorrows. It’s very beautifully done.

But it’s time to get back to Kristin, it’s her book after all! While staying at the convent in Oslo, she bumps into Erlend, and they quickly fall in love, plus a massive amount of lust, with each other. There are huge difficulties, including the fact that Kristin is engaged to the man her parents have chosen for her, and that Erlend has a very mixed past, including children by an ex. 

These problems are compounded when Kristin falls pregnant by Erlend. But somehow they battle through. Kristin’s fiancé, who deeply loves her, and whose story would make a substantial novel on its own, accepts that her heart has been given to another and reluctantly gives way, marrying her sister on the rebound. In a scene of grand guignol (there’ve been enough spoilers already, so I won’t say more), the problem of Erlend’s ex is cleared away.

They finally marry – but this is not a happily ever after story! Erlend brings her home to his massive estate, where chaos reigns, because Erlend simply has no interest in or aptitude for running it. He’d sooner be hunting or commanding his warriors in battle. As a result of his indifference, everything is filthy, nobody does anything, and poor Kristin is expected to manage a household in which she is a complete stranger. 

Through sheer firmness of character, and through various battles, while rearing a large brood of children, she brings order, and with it, prosperity and happiness, to the estate and the large number of people who are part of it. Kristin arrives as a sort of Flora Post figure, taking civilisation to Cold Comfort Farm. Undset presents a powerful female character who overcomes and who makes a big difference to the betterment of other people’s lives. Erlend needs Kristin for more than she needs him. She is undoubtedly the stronger character. And so they row constantly in this attraction / repulsion of opposites.

Contemplating Undset’s feminism as above reminds me that I found myself having to stop reading several times for sheer embarrassment and shame at being a man – the readiness to appropriate women’s bodies, futures, feelings and relationships, and use them for their own ends... Undset doesn’t lecture her readers about this, she just tells it, as part of the texture of her characters’ lives, and it cuts all the deeper for that.

This is literature working as it should, isn’t it, opening up insights on other people’s lives, viewing them from the inside, and thus enabling us to experience something of life as they experience it, to empathise. If it is painful sometimes to see ourselves as others see us, that is a healthy pain. It’s also a very different take on literature to a contemporary one in which literature seems to be treated as a branch of women’s studies: women should write for women and men with their stupid thrillers and potboilers should keep out! It is sad to contemplate this narrowing of empathy.

I’ve probably given away far too much plot already. Let’s talk about Undset’s Catholicism for a bit. It’s notable how well served Pre-Reformation Norway is served by its beautiful churches and transcendentally inspiring  music. Several times Kristin approaches and then enters a church building new to her and is overpowered with awe by their lofty construction, gorgeous stained glass and beautiful singing. Question: at what point do these amazing aesthetics cease to be vehicles for the presence of the One who transcends them all and become objects of adoration in their own right? Is this the point of the scene where Lavrans’ beloved village church is struck by lightning and burns to the ground? Has it come to mean more to its parishioners than God Himself? As with so many other events, Undset describes but does not comment. Her art is to leave it to us to respond in our own way…

Its priests are also amazingly effective. There is one who isn’t particularly helpful and another who is a scoundrel and rapist, whom Kristin manages to fight off early in her story. Otherwise they are holy, humble, wise, intelligent, excellent communicators, highly motivated, with a deep concern for the welfare of their flock. How far this is from the highly fallible church we hear about in today’s media!

In setting all this out Undset shows considerable theological acuity. For example there is a very interesting discussion between the impulsive Erlend, Kristin’s husband, and his brother Gunnulf, a priest in the mould mentioned above, who is increasingly Kristin’s mentor. The two brothers are very close, with a deep love for one another, and some parallels in their histories: for example, Erlend goes forth as a chieftain to fight the Finns, while Gunnulf goes forth as a missionary to evangelise them (incidentally, for any Finns reading this, sadly you don’t get a very good press in Kristin Lavransdatter - It’s still a magnificent novel though!) The brothers have just bade farewell to Kristin, who has set off on a pilgrimage to Trondheim Cathedral to seek atonement for her sins.

Erlend and Gunnulf fall into a discussion of Erlend’s history with Kristin, revealing a deep divergence in their understanding of sin. Erlend is trying to convince himself that he neither sinned nor dragged Kristin into sin when they made love before their marriage, firstly because they had made vows to one another which were binding in God’s sight, and secondly because there had been no legal marriage to Eline, the mother of his children, and their sexual relationship had come to an end. Gunnulf isn’t having it. Erlend came very close to destroying permanently Kristin’s standing in society, implicated her in deceiving the sisters at the nunnery, trampled on the feelings of her parents and her fiancé, and would cheerfully have thrown Auntie Aashild to the lions to get his way.

In short, Erlend’s view of sin is transgressional: did you break the rules? If not, fine! It leads to a “how much can I get away with without technically breaking the rules” approach. Gunnulf’s is relational: “how many people did you hurt?” Erlend’s self-centred actions left a trail of damaged people in his wake. This offends the God who is love. He gave commandments, not so we could appear righteous to ourselves by ticking boxes, but to protect the vulnerable from the harmful actions of their exploiters.

Another interesting dimension is the interaction with pre-Christian spiritualities. You get the feeling, in little incidents scattered throughout the book, that C13th Norway, while avowedly Christian, is only a few steps away from paganism. Just a few paces from the forest trail or past the edges of the fields, or during a famine or a difficult childbirth, there are spirits with their own non-human agendas, powers to be invoked or placated, even rites to be tried out if the church or the saints won’t help. As a sincere Christian, Lavrans removes pagan imagery from the family home – but this leaves many members of his household feeling distinctly uncomfortable.

Yet again Undset doesn’t give a sermon on the Catholic view of such things, she just presents it as part of the texture of the people’s stories. Two particular incidents stick in the mind. Very early on, while she is still a girl, Kristin gets lost in the hills. She sees a beautiful girl child about her own age, but of some sort of faery kin; but there is a bond of some sort between them. Did it really happen? Was it a projection of her distress at being lost? Or some sort of dream? Undset doesn’t tell us, she just lets it resonate… But Aashild, who has the reputation of being a witch, and it is never resolved whether this is a justified reputation or not, advises her not to speak of it. 

Much darker is an event at the end of the story. The plague has swept through Norway and destroyed whole communities, including most of Kristin’s family. Erlend is now dead and Kristin has become a nun. She learns of a plot to sacrifice a child, the son, with severe learning difficulties, of a desperately poor widow. The people are frantic, reduced to absolute despair by the terror of the plague and, as God has not responded to their prayers, they want to turn back to the Old Ways. With amazing strength of character, Kristin confronts them and prevents the murder. She then goes to find and comfort the widowed mother – whom she finds dying of the plague. In a St Francis like action, she holds the mother in her arms, contracts the disease herself, and soon after dies horrifically.

I felt terrible after reading this. Not Kristin, not like this… Undset is unsparing. Yet so is life. We must all face our own mortality, and most forms of death, especially long drawn out ones, are pretty squalid. Undset doesn’t leave us with a happy ending, any more than life does. Perhaps Kristin has witnessed faithfully to Christ, who died in the place of the wretched woman’s child so that he wouldn’t have to, so that no further sacrifice can ever be valid... Perhaps she has acted for “the least of these my brethren” and therefore for the Son of Man, and will be welcomed to the place prepared for her… Perhaps she has returned to her first calling and first love in the via contemplativa, having had the via activa with Erlend so terribly wrenched away from her… Perhaps she has taken up her cross and given herself completely in love for God and others… But we have to bring whatever our own faith may be to the story to answer these questions, for Undset won’t preach to us.

One last reflection on Undset’s faith. Isn’t it the case that her Christianity, far from narrowing the humanity of her novel, as carping secular critics were wont to assert of Christian writing in the twentieth century, has actually vastly deepened and broadened it? Isn’t the tenderness, expressiveness, pathos, beauty and compassion of Kristin Lavransdatter deeply rooted in the Gospel of God incarnated in humanity and suffering for and with us? Doesn’t it open up sympathies, symbols, insights and perspectives that are simply not available on naturalistic terms?

Of course there are poor Christian novelists, and good secular ones. But if we look to the great novelists from the heyday of the sort of huge epic novel I find myself increasingly drawn to these days, it’s those Christian perspectives on suffering, redemption, love and death, the value of every human being in the eyes of God and the compassion that springs from that value, that give them their power and reach – their humanity. I’m thinking Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Manzoni, Dickens. I’m going to squeeze George Eliot in there: though she succumbed with regret to “the Germans” and abandoned her faith, she was still imbued with its values through her Christian upbringing. And I’m going to go forward into the C20th and 21st and rejoice in the works of Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Donna Tartt and Francis Spufford (see reviews elsewhere on this blog) which for me reach higher than many of their contemporaries because they have a Christian foundation to build upon.

And now to end where we began, many paragraphs ago, with the TLS. It made the point that Sigrid Undset was born in the same year as Virginia Woolf, and their novels were appearing at the same time. For all their experimentation, for me Woolf’s work seems unstructured, self-indulgent and shallow by comparison. There, I’ve said the unsayable and offended everyone. But where is the reach? Where is the compassion? Where is the humanity?