Kristin Lavransdatter

 I really haven't been following the Vikings craze on TV: not my culture, and the dirty little secret is that they kidnapped people to sell as slaves to mainly Muslim countries who needed cheap labor.

I always am leery about history that ignores what ordinary folk might be doing or thinking: as they say: The past is another country, and if there is anything I have learned about working with people in four countries and a half dozen different countries is that people in different cultures think differently and have different priorities.

I enjoy reading historical fiction and fiction about different cultures, but am leery when they follow the modern memes, or have a hero or heroine who thinks like a 21st century feminist. 

Yet to be successful, a writer has to have a character who bridges the gap between the modern and the other culture. So Hobbits are stolid middle Class Englishmen in a world of high chivalry, or with the dwarves, folks with an honor culture. Or in Outlander, we have Claire, a modern women thrust into the highland culture of 18th century Scotland.

In Kristin Lavrensdatter, I happily found that Kristin doesn't think like a modern woman, for all of her independence and fighting against the culture around her to marry the man she loves. But she is close enough to modern day thinking for us to sympathize with her.

A long novel, which can be downloaded HERE, or you can buy a more modern translation of the novel on amazon.

One longs for the story to be told in a long miniseries: because the acclaimed film version of the first book has many flaws: simplifying the complex backstory of the many characters, something that can be blamed on the limited running time of modern film.

But the main flaw of the movie is the man cast as Erlend is a dork, not a charmer as he is in the book.

Technically, the novel includes many details on homelife of medieval Norway that were known to Undset because her father was an archeologist. But one suspects that some of the plot was inspired by her life as a feminist rebelling against society in pre WWI era.

There is an essay on the life and marital travails of the author, Sigrid Undset, on the Plough website.

Undset’s grounding in Norway’s past made Kristin Lavransdatter a masterpiece of national and world literature, but her keen moral realism and understanding of the human heart sprang from her own history: the humbling failure of her own marriage, and the spiritual quest for eternal truth inspired by research into the faith of the past.