Sigrid Undset - Kristin Lavransdatter

Table of Contents

PENGUIN CLASSICSDELUXE EDITION

KRISTIN LAVRANSDATTER

SIGRID UNDSET was born in Denmark in 1882, the eldest daughter of a Norwegian father and a Danish mother, and moved with her family to Oslo two years later. She published her first novel, Fru Marta Oulie (Mrs. Marta Oulie) in 1907 and her second book, Den lykkelige alder (The Happy Age), in 1908. The following year she published her first work set in the Middle Ages, Fortllingen om Viga-Ljot og Vigdis (later translated into English under the title Gunnars Daughter and now available in Penguin Classics). More novels and stories followed, including Jenny (1911, first translated 1920), Fattige skjbner (Fates of the Poor, 1912), Vaaren (Spring, 1914), Splinten av troldspeilet (translated in part as Images in a Mirror, 1917), and De kloge jomfruer (The Wise Virgins, 1918). In 1920 Undset published the first volume of Kristin Lavransdatter, the medieval trilogy that would become her most famous work. Kransen (The Wreath) was followed by Husfrue (The Wife) in 1921 and Korset (The Cross) in 1922. Beginning in 1925 she published the four-volume Olav Audunssn i Hestviken (translated into English under the title The Master of Hestviken), also set in the Middle Ages. In 1928 Sigrid Undset won the Nobel Prize in Literature. During the 1930s she published several more novels, notably the autobiographical Elleve aar (translated as The Longest Years, 1934). She was also a prolific essayist on subjects ranging from Scandinavian history and literature to the Catholic Church (to which she became a convert in 1924) and politics. During the Nazi occupation of Norway, Undset lived as a refugee in New York City. She returned home in 1945 and lived in Lillehammer until her death in 1949.

TIINA NUNNALLY has translated all three volumes of Kristin Lavransdatter for Penguin Classics. She won the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize for the third volume, The Cross. Her translations of the first and second volumes, The Wreath and The Wife, were finalists for the PEN Center USA West Translation Award, and The Wife was also a finalist for the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize. Her other translations include Hans Christian Andersens Fairy Tales; Undsets Jenny; Per Olov Enquists The Royal Physicians Visit (Independent Foreign Fiction Prize); Peter Hegs Smillas Sense of Snow (Lewis Galantire Prize given by the American Translators Association); Jens Peter Jacobsens Niels Lyhne (PEN Center USA West Translation Award); and Tove Ditlevsens Early Spring (American-Scandinavian Foundation Translation Prize). Also the author of three novels, Maija, Runemaker, and Fate of Ravens, Nunnally holds an M.A. in Scandinavian Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

BRAD LEITHAUSER is the author of several novels, including Darlingtons Fall, A Few Corrections, The Friends of Freeland, and Equal Distance, as well as poetry and essays. His work appears regularly in The New York Review of Books, his awards include a MacArthur Fellowship, and he is Emily Dickinson Lecturer in the Humanities at Mount Holyoke College, where he teaches courses in writing and literature.

To request Penguin Readers Guides by mail
(while supplies last), please call (800) 778-6425
or e-mail reading@us.penguingroup.com.
To access Penguin Readers Guides online,
visit our Web site at www.penguin.com.

INTRODUCTION

LADY WITH A PAST

MY FIRST FORAY into the world of Kristin Lavransdatter, the Nobel laureate Sigrid Undsets celebrated trilogy of novels set in fourteenth-century Norway, turned out to be a reading experience like no other. Im thinking here less of the books themselves (though these were an unexpected delight, a convincing twentieth-century evocation of medieval Norway) than of the personal encounters the books fostered.

The trilogy runs over one thousand pages in the old three-in-one Knopf hardcover Id picked up secondhand, and I chose to read it slowly, for weeks on end, lugging the hefty, handsome volume everywhere I went. One of its themes is the stubborn power of magicthe bewitching allure of pagan practices in a society that had officially but not wholeheartedly embraced Christianityand the trilogy did seem to work magical effects: it drew elderly women to me.

Memory tells me that this must have happened seven or eight times, but probably it was more like four. In any event, the encounters were much of a piece. An older woman sitting by me on the subway, or waiting beside me in a line at the Department of Motor Vehicles, or having lunch at a nearby table, would cross the boundary separating strangers in order to volunteer that she, too, had once read Kristin Lavransdattera remark accompanied by that special glow which comes at the recollection of a distant but enduring pleasure.

Early in the trilogy arrives a moment emblematic of Undsets over-arching ambitions and designs. For the first time in her life our heroine, Kristin Lavransdatter, age seven, leaves the valley that has heretofore circumscribed her existence. A new sort of panorama beckons and beguiles:

The revelation is geographical for Kristin but temporal for the reader, who also is to be granted a breathtaking new vista, as a world many centuries old emerges with crystalline clarity. Indeed, the books deepest pleasures may be retrocessive. The trilogy advances with a relentless forward motion, following Kristin methodically from the age of seven until her death, at about fifty, from the Black Death, but the readers greatest thrill is the rearward one of feeling tugged back into a half-pagan world where local spirits still inhabit the streams and cairns and shadowy forests. The trilogy sets us in an earlier age that looks back, uneasily, on a still earlier age.

Kristin Lavransdatter was a publishing phenomenon. My own edition was the seventeenth printingan elaborate clothbound hardcover published in 1973, a half century after the trilogy first appeared in English. The trilogy was a main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, where its striking success elicited an unprecedented testimonial: We consider it the best book our judges have ever selected and it has been better received by our subscribers than any other book.

Continuously in print for three-quarters of a century, Kristin Lavransdatter is today that rarity of foreign twentieth-century novels: one with competing translations available. Still, it plainly hasnt captivated later generations as it once did. Though Undset may well be, even now, the best-known modern Scandinavian novelist in the United States, she has been little embraced by academia (which has overlooked Scandinavia generally, apart from its play wrights), and the trilogy is perhaps gradually moving, in the language of the blurb, from beloved masterpiece to cult classic. When, in 2001, Steerforth Press brought out