Sigrid Undset - Kristin Lavransdatter: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

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.

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This edition first published in Penguin Books 2005

Translation and notes copyright Tiina Nunnally, 1997, 1999, 2000

Introduction copyright Brad Leithauser, 2005 All rights reserved

The Wreath , The Wife , and The Cross are published in individual volumes by Penguin Books.

These works were originally published in Norwegian by H. Aschehoug & Company, Oslo: The Wreath
under the title Kransen in 1920; The Wife as Husfrue in 1921; and The Cross as Korset in 1922.

Mr. Leithausers introduction first appeared in The New York Reviw of Books .

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Undset, Sigrid, 1882-1949.
[Kristin Lavransdatter. English]
Kristin Lavransdatter / Sigrid Undset ; translated with notes by Tiina Nunnally ;
introduction by Brad Leithauser.
p. cm.
Originally published as 3 separate works: New York : Penguin Books, 1997-2000.
Contents: 1. The wreath2. The wife3. The cross.

eISBN : 978-1-101-09548-5

I. Nunnally, Tiina, 1952- II. Title.
PT8950.U5K713 2005
839.82372dc 2005048941

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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 Lavransdatter a 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: