Kristen Lavransdatter is the story of a housewife in medieval times, but it is more than that: it shows a woman in a complex society coping with adversity, including a wayward husband and losing her home. I liked it, not only for the story, but because it is an easy way to learn about the culture. Unlike many "historical" novels, Kristen does not act or think like a modern woman. And in the background you learn many facts about daily life (they ate porridge?).
By thirty pages in, we are not only bathed in this exotic environment, but exposed more directly to hard facts of life that are ignored, today, until it is too late. We feel the winter cold and the demands made to survive it; we begin to understand that if the crops fail, we will starve. The consequence of every human action is amplified, in the absence of our “safety nets.” The politics which Undset depicts are personalized, not abstract and ideological: men of all classes take counsel of each other, not from lofty principles but out of necessity. The dependency of man on man, of woman on woman, of man on woman, and woman on man, was no parlour game. We are about as far as we can get from the fatuities and asininities of “human rights.”
Here Warren explains why this very feminist novel is not something that is encouraged to be read in Women's studies: because Kristen, and all the other women, see themselves as part of a family:
Undset absolutely refuses to be shallow. She grew up as a feminist; her own mother had been by 1880 well ahead of the “sisterhood” today. Our authoress had written when quite young various feminist tracts, and short novels meant to be “contemporary” and alarming. In the face of reality, through the First World War, she had grown out of it.
And from her own difficult life, full of man problems, and children not only her own, she was in no possible doubt that women are moral agents in the fullest truth.
Not only most spectacularly in her protagonist, Kristin, or in Kristin’s mother Ragnfrid, or later her daughter-in-law Jofrid, but in the little galaxy of other characters through the passing scenes, the theme of motherhood is revolved.
Moreover, not only Kristin in the foreground, but other females in the story are wilful souls. As we will see, for better and for worse, they will not be shackled. In the relations between the women, Undset tackles issues that even our best woman novelists tend to ignore: because Undset’s women live also through their men, their sons and their daughters, and therefore through time in a way our post-family microwave life has forgotten. This does not diminish but enhances their place in the world.he prefers the older translation to the more modern one by Nunnaly, as I also do: it is more poetic, and echoes the older Norse tone of the original, but if you prefer easier reading, the Nunnaly one is the way to start.
I have read both translations, and have two copies with me here: One I brought with me, which I bought as a used book and is falling apart... and then my stepdaughter who had been an exchange student in Denmark and loved the book, sent me copies of the newer translation as a gift.
But more recently, I am listening to it on my tablet (which reads ebooks), and you know, listening gives you a different version too: because you have to pay attention to parts that often I skim through while reading: things like scenery, or cooking, or small things that you might skim through as unimportant, like the priest who at one of her father's parties started a fight when someone mentioned a rumor (this seemed to be just a normal quarrel showing priests got drunk back then, but 300 pages later you find the priest knew the rumor was about her mother, and he wanted to shut the guy up).
It's a long read-- it is a trilogy, split into the courtship, the marriage, and her life as a widow--- but if you don't have it at your library, you can download it at internet archives LINK or read it on line.
There was a movie made on the first book LINK which gives an idea of the scenery and clothing and follows the plot of the book.
But I was annoyed at the film: it is miscast and the post Freudian bias in the script distorts the characters as one dimensional sexually repressed people. The cultural background is left out, as are a lot of the nuances and backstory that give insight to the characters.
Kristen, who in the book is so beautiful and graceful that a lot of men fall in love with her and want to protect her, is presented as a self centered neurotic female, and her charming, clintonesque lover/husband is portrayed by someone who looks and acts dorky. What is worse, there is no sexual tension between the characters as portrayed on screen.
Her loving father, who correctly sees Kristen's choice of husband is a mistake, is made out as if he is just a nasty puritan, and religion? not there at all.
this is one book one wishes that NetFlix or the BBC would film as a miniseries.
but if you have time, read the book, and then re read it later. Like most classics, it is a hard slog to get through, but is worth a couple of reads.
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