This section of the website is to celebrate and, if needed, promote works of prose and poetry, famous or obscure, translated into English – https://davidselzer.com/2025/04/found-in-translation-introduction-david-selzer/. I would very much like readers to contact me about works translated into English which have particular significance for them and which they would like featured on the site. I shall also be commissioning posts about particular works and/or writers.
Mary Clark’s piece is the second in the series.
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‘KRISTIN LAVRANSDATTER’ is a trilogy of novels by Sigrid Undset set in Norway in the 1300s – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigrid_Undset. ‘THE BRIDAL WREATH’, ‘THE MISTRESS OF HUSABY’, and ‘THE CROSS’ tell the story of a woman from childhood to death.
When it was first published in the 1920s, women’s rights were at the forefront. For decades this hefty trilogy has been passed down in my family, and I suspect quite a few others, from mother to daughter. Generations have rediscovered the book as evidenced through online review pages. In a way it has become a rite of passage.
Kristin Lavransdatter struggles within the constraints of religion and feudalism. The three novels also bring the reader into her interior life. She experiences guilt, anger, hatred and love, all tangled up with Christian teachings. Norway’s stark landscape and Medieval culture interlace the story.
She lives in a small community where her father is well-respected. Her mother is often filled with worry or dread while her father is the opposite. Kristin spends a great deal of time with her father. She lives a largely unsupervised life, playing with other children from the nearby farms and village. One playmate, Arne, becomes her best friend.
When Kristin’s younger sister suffers a terrible accident which leaves her partially paralyzed. Kristin remembers that a priest told her families send the disabled to the convents but expect the healthy girls to become wives and mothers. She ponders their different fates. She even wonders if she were to go to the convent instead of her sister, would her sister stay on the farm and get well?
Kristin’s father arranges her marriage to Simon, a young man who will inherit an estate. When Simon visits the family, Kristin finds him acceptable. Meanwhile, Arne comes of age, is sent to court, and asks her to meet him on his last day in the village. They meet in a secluded place where he professes his love. She tells him she wishes things were different but she cannot go against her father. Arne rides away as evening falls.
Kristin starts toward home. On the way she is confronted by a man, Priestson, who is drunk and tries to assault her. She fights him off and runs to the nearest home for safety. She tells the woman who helps her what happened, who unfortunately is Priestson’s mother.
Months later, news reaches her that Arne is dead. She accompanies her father to Arne’s family home, where to her shock, Arne’s mother accuses her of being the cause of her son’s death. It turns out Priestson had sat next to Arne at a dinner and told him he had met Kristin on the road that night she said goodbye to Arne and Kristin had not refused his advances, implying that they had sex. When Arne confronts him, Priestson stabs him.
This story lands like a blow on Kristin and her father. They learn the village has been gossiping about Kristin for some time. Her fiancé, Simon, is present and takes control. He faces down the crowd and carries Kristin back home. But she soon resents the way he treats her as his property, and her parents’ deference to him as well.
She will be sent to a convent to keep her safe until she marries Simon. There she will learn a more structured life. A nun tells her she should ask God for help in dire situations. She had not done that when she was attacked, in fact, it didn’t occur to her. She tries to be more pious.
One day she, another novice, and a chaperone walk to the local town. An attack by a wild man or beast sends the inhabitants scrambling for the hills. Kristin and the other girl are lost, wandering until they come to a farm where men are feasting at a table. They ask the men for help and two men agree to guide them back to the convent. Kristin eventually realizes they are going in the wrong direction. Just as the men start to rob and assault them, Kristin prays for help. She hears voices on the road. A group of horsemen come to the girls’ rescue. The leader of the group, dark and sober, is Erlend Nikulaussön.
Back at the convent, Kristin and the other girl are told for penance they must stay in the church until midnight. She thinks of having prayed for help and help arrived. She has a spiritual experience which is described this way:
She saw the world as in a vision; a great dark room whereinto fell a sunbeam; the motes were dancing in and out between the darkness and the light, and she felt that now she had at last slipped into the sunbeam—
At the edge of this glow, outside it, hovers Erlend.
She had no knowledge she had thought much of him that evening, but the whole time the thoughts of his dark, narrow face and his quiet voice had hung somewhere in the dusk outside the glow of light that enfolded her spirit.
With these episodes Undset provides the framework for Kristin’s story: the structured, pious life versus the natural, free flowing one; the carnal juxtaposed with the spiritual; political and social pressures versus one’s own needs and perception of reality; and the conscious versus subconscious workings of our minds.
Erlend is a wild-spirited man (some readers connect him with the pagan Mountain King). They are drawn together: both he and Kristin are passionate and strong-willed characters. Erlend is involved with another man’s wife, a woman who tries to poison Kristin but then drinks the poison herself. The ensuing moral dilemma: people will think they forced the woman to drink the poison in order to marry. Another moral challenge: Kristin asks her betrothed, Simon, to free her from their arranged marriage, suggesting that he tell people it was his idea.
She and Erlend marry and have eight children. He becomes involved in the country’s politics, often away from home, leaving Kristin to manage the farm and care for their children. Erlend becomes a sheriff and acquires some wealth and influence. When Erlend is accused of treason and in danger of prison or worse, she thinks of who she can ask for help and finds not many friends remain. Simon, who still has feelings for her, saves Erlend from torture and death. Her father’s influence with the king helps as well: Lavrans opposes torture (not done in Norway) and taxing peasants to pay for war.
At one point, she lashes out at Erlend and he withdraws to live on a remote estate. Then there is grief over the death of a child. The tensions between them raise the issues of selfishness and forgiveness.
In her moments of reflection, she learns how she has missed signals and overt gestures from those around her, for example, her insensitivity to Arne when he took his final leave of her, Simon’s continuing infatuation, and her husband’s moods. Critical thinking helps her dismiss superstition and coercive religious values.
Excerpt:
She knew not herself what had taken her, to leave the house in this wise, at dead of night. She came to stand by the stone—set her foot in a notch in it. Her belly shrank, her body grew cold and numb with fear—but cross herself she would not. Then she crept up and sat her down upon the stone.
From here one saw far and wide around—away over the ugly grey-stone mountains in the moonlight. … She was chilled through bone and marrow—terror and cold pressed in upon her from all sides. But she sat on defiant.
She would not go down and lay herself in the black darkness by her husband’s warm, slumbering body. For her there was no sleep that night, she knew—
Here is the full text of Kristin’s reflections on her marriage:
Erlend dies in a misadventure, speared in the chest. He refuses the ceremonies of the Catholic priests, accepting himself as a sinner and leaving his salvation up to God alone. Kristin needs the rituals to help absorb her losses, the cultural ways that people have used to make that transition, and which we have mainly lost in modern society.
After her younger son’s marriage (also a complicated affair), she retires to a convent. She saves a child from murder, ensures an abandoned corpse is properly buried, and cares for the sick. She becomes ill with the plague and dies.
Her experiences are universal, but the story is told from her point of view as a woman. Family responsibility, pregnancy and childbirth, errant husbands, society’s view of women, caring for the sick, injured in war and the dying, all are set in the midst of romantic and political intrigues.
She grapples with the questions of free will, how much and often can we forgive, and how can we find redemption without reliance on meaningless gestures or causes? And each one of us is inextricably linked to our times, with our actions having impacts on other people and our societies.
©Mary Clark 2025
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Notes: 1. Mary Clark’s own work has been featured in the website’s OTHER PEOPLE’S FLOWERS – https://davidselzer.com/2021/10/other-peoples-flowers-mary-clark-writer/.
2. A new translation of the trilogy in English was published by Penguin in 2022.
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By David Selzer