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Kristin Lavransdatter: A Good Long Winter's Read
By Constance M Gotsch
Rated "PG13" by the Author.
Last
edited: Thursday, October 27, 2005
Posted: Thursday, October 27, 2005
Many novels set in the Middle Ages happen to have a few people and a few human values in them. Authors dwell upon the trappings of the times, ensnaring their characters in endless descriptions of clothing and castles, until the stories read like a 6th Grade history text, in which a child hero takes the reader through the facts and figures of the era by recreating A Day in the Life of A Knight. Or a Monk. Or a Serf.
Then, there’s Sigrid Undsett’s ‘Kristin Lavransdatter."
Kristin Lavransdatter A Good Long Winter’s Read.
Many novels set in the Middle Ages happen to have a few people and a few human values in them. Authors dwell upon the trappings of the times, ensnaring their characters in endless descriptions of clothing and castles, until the stories read like a 6th Grade history text, in which a child hero takes the reader through the facts and figures of the era by recreating A Day in the Life of A Knight. Or a Monk. Or a Serf.
Then, there’s Sigrid Undsett’s ‘Kristin Lavransdatter,’ written in the 1920s and winner of a Nobel Prize for Literature. This novel contains strong people with real attitudes, who happen to live in 14th Century Norway. Universal themes create a link between the Medieval era and modern times, the same way the motifs of ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ or ‘Othello’ link the Renaissance to the 21st Century.
The epic story (over 1100 pages) focuses on Kristin, the strong-willed and somewhat spoiled daughter of the knight, Lavran. Intelligent but impetuous, Kristin struggles through her teenage years, breaks an engagement to the embarrassment of her parents, and marries Erland, a man of whom they disapprove.
Kristin and Erland have a rocky, but at the same time joyous marriage. In some ways, he is a disappointing husband. He is a passionate lover, but cannot manage money or land, and has no common sense about people. Forced to become the brains of the family, Kristin constantly struggles between keeping her place as a woman, and managing finances and fields.
As her children grow up, Erland gets on the wrong side of national politics and plunges the family into poverty. She copes. Eventually he dies in a fight. She becomes a nun. .
Sigrid Undsett takes Kristin through every phase of development, from a little girl terrified when she thinks she sees a forest nymph, to a teen refusing to see the wisdom in guidance her parents are trying to give her, to becoming a mother and understanding exactly what they meant, to making peace with herself at the end of her life.
More exciting, the author places other characters, Erland, Kristin’s parents, her children, siblings, family priests, in-laws, and friends, in situations very similar to hers. But they have their own ways of reacting, depending on their temperaments and backgrounds. This creates layers and layers of human thought and action for a reader to compare and contrast in ‘Kristin Lavransdatter.’. Undsett also varies the pace of the book, balancing character action with contemplation. She holds the description of Kristin’s surrounds to what she needs to drive plot and character, giving a picture of 14th Century material culture without excessive detail. She manages this in part because she grew up with an archaeologist father, who specialized in the Medieval Period. From early childhood she heard about artifacts of the Middle Ages and their uses. When she did her own research for ‘Kristin Lavransdatter,’ she had long passed infatuation with castles, and could concentrate on the humanity of the knights living in them.
‘Kristinlavransdatter’ was written in Norwegian. The original English translation, dating to 1951, imitated Medieval grammar and usage. The result was a dense and complex tangle of phrase, paragraph and sentence, which made the book difficult to read.
A translation finished this year by Albuquerque writer Tina Nunnally stripped away the faux Old English. Ms. Nunnally used simple, modern language with an occasional nod to earlier forms.
The combination of skillful author and sensitive translator makes ‘Kristin Lavransdatter’ an attention-holding read despite its length. Students of human nature will love the story. So will people who like historical fiction. Young adults will identify with ‘Kristin Lavransdatter’ as will their grandparents.
Author Sigrid Undsett
Title Kristin Lavransdatter
Hardcover: 1088 pages
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
405 Murray Hill Parkway
East Rutherford, NJ 07073
Language: English
ISBN: 0394432622
$44.95 Amazon
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