The Wreath (Kristin Lavransdatter #1)
Sigrid Undset
TRANSLATOR’S
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to many people for their support of this translation. Special thanks go to Kristin Brudevoll and the Norwegian Literature Abroad office in Oslo for years of steadfast friendship and assistance. Thanks also to Sverre M?rkhagen for answering many of my questions in his excellent companion work, Kristins verden, which explains the historical background of Undset’s novel. I am most grateful to Candace Robb for reading the manuscript with such care and offering me her expertise on many aspects of the medieval period. I would like to thank Christine Ingebritsen and Katherine Hanson for their sound advice and encouragement. And I am deeply indebted to Steven T. Murray for his linguistic fine-tuning of the translation and for his gift of hearing the music of the words, in both Norwegian and English. Finally, I thank my editor, Caroline White, for her fine collaboration, and Penguin Books for deciding that the time was ripe for a new English translation of Sigrid Undset’s epic novel.
INTRODUCTION
If you peel away the layer of ideas and conceptions that
are particular to your own time period, then you can step
right into the Middle Ages and see life from the medieval
point of view—and it will coincide with your own view.
And if you try to reproduce precisely what you have seen,
the narrative form will follow automatically. Then you will
write as a contemporary. It is only possible to write novels
from your own time.
—Sigrid Undset
Sigrid Undset clearly perceived the Middle Ages as her “own time.” It was a period of Norwegian history that largely mirrored her own worldview, combining a strong sense of loyalty to family and community with a foundation in the teachings of the Catholic Church. She set her most famous works in the Middle Ages, immersing herself in the legal, religious, and historical writings of the time to create astoundingly authentic and compelling portraits of Norwegian life. And yet she was very nearly dissuaded from writing any kind of historical novel at all.
Undset’s interest in the past was solidly established during her childhood. She was born in Denmark in 1882, the eldest daughter of Ingvald Undset, a respected Norwegian archaeologist from Trondheim who had written an influential book on the Iron Age. Sigrid’s mother was Charlotte Gyth Undset, an educated woman from a distinguished Danish family in Kalundborg, who assisted her husband in his work by acting as his secretary and illustrator. When Sigrid was two, her family moved to Oslo, where her father took a position with the antiquities department at the university.
Sigrid spent her early years surrounded by the artifacts and books of her father’s profession. She was allowed to handle and examine ancient swords, jewelry, and other relics belonging to the museum where he worked. Her father also took her to visit the ix cathedral in Trondheim (formerly Nidaros, the center of ecclesiastical power in Norway during the Middle Ages), which had inspired his own choice of occupation. Most important of all, Sigrid was introduced to the dramatic and stirring tales of the Icelandic sagas. When she was ten she discovered Njal’s Saga, which decades later she would recall as the “most important turning point in my life.”
In 1893, Ingvald Undset’s precarious health finally failed, and Sigrid’s beloved father died at the age of forty. His widow was left with three young daughters to support on an annual state pension of 800 kroner, a small sum even at that time. To make ends meet, the family moved to a smaller apartment, and Charlotte Undset was forced to sell some of their furniture, as well as her husband’s large collection of books and antiquities. Years later, Sigrid, by then a famous author with a steady income from her writing, searched for and bought back as many of her father’s books as she could find. And she would one day pay the greatest tribute to her father by incarnating him in one of her noblest characters, Lavrans Bj?rgulfs?n.
In spite of the family’s difficult circumstances, Charlotte Undset decided not to seek refuge with her relatives in Denmark; she knew that her husband wanted his children to grow up Norwegian. This proved to be a momentous decision for her eldest daughter. The tumultuous history and rugged, mountainous terrain of Norway—quite different from the flat, rolling landscape of Denmark—would play an important role in Sigrid Undset’s writing.
Sigrid and her sisters were offered free tuition at the highly regarded and politically liberal school run by Ragna Nielsen, one of the founders of the Norwegian Women’s Union and a staunch supporter of the suffragist movement. In spite of the high quality of instruction and her own obvious intellectual abilities, Sigrid found school dull, and she ended her formal education when she passed the middle-level exam. She then struggled through a secretarial training program. At the age of seventeen she went to work for the Wisbech Electrical Company, a subsidiary of a German firm, the Allgemeine Elektrizit?ts Gesellschaft. She worked nine-hour days for a starting salary of 30 kroner a month and stayed in that job for ten years.
It was at this time that Sigrid Undset first realized she wanted to be a serious writer. She had written puppet plays and little stories for her sisters, but she had a talent for drawing and she had always dreamed of being a painter, not a writer. Now she put her sketchbook aside as she read Chaucer and Shakespeare, Keats and Shelley, the sagas, and legends of the saints. She studied Latin and Greek late into the night. In a letter to her Swedish pen pal Dea (Andrea Hedberg), Sigrid wrote that she had discovered in herself an “artist’s temperament,” which she found somewhat unsettling: There’s nothing I have greater contempt for than “artiness,” and especially for those useless creatures who possess the type of artistic temperament that produces nothing, who are artists for their own sakes, which means that they possess only the “introspective” characteristics of the artistic temperament: egotism, a lack of ability and desire to work, a lack of interest in and love for others, as well as a wild imagination, so they dream away their time... [But] I can no longer rein in my desire to dream, nor do I have any wish to do so. I spend all of my spare time wandering along the country roads and playing with my fantasies, scraps of made-up novels, images from my dreams, and memories of landscapes from past summers.