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Understanding Undset

Sigrid Undset’s is doubtlessly among the twentieth century’s greatest writers, even though Kristin Lavransdatter, her main works of literature, is set in the fourteenth century. At the ceremony awarding Undset the 1928 Nobel Prize for Literature, Per Hallström described the writer’s narrative as “vigorous, sweeping, and at times heavy”:

It rolls on like a river, ceaselessly receiving new tributaries whose course the author also describes, at the risk of overtaxing the reader’s memory. […] And the vast river, whose course is difficult to embrace comprehensively, rolls its powerful waves which carry along the reader, plunged into a sort of torpor. But the roaring of its waters has the eternal freshness of nature. In the rapids and in the falls, the reader finds the enchantment which emanates from the power of the elements, as in the vast mirror of the lakes he notices a reflection of immensity, with the vision there of all possible greatness in human nature. Then, when the river reaches the sea, when Kristin Lavransdatter has fought to the end the battle of her life, no one complains of the length of the course which accumulated so overwhelming a depth and profundity in her destiny. In the poetry of all times, there are few scenes of comparable excellence.

Obviously Kristin Lavransdatter must be read for itself. I started reading it in the Stellenbosch University library a decade ago and was able to finish it thanks to being given a copy by a kindly Premonstratensian.

But the woman behind Kristin wrote more: her biographical essays and other works (like the one describing a visit to Glastonbury) are just as enjoyable and insightful.

At First Things, Elizabeth Scalia describes Undset’s lives of saints and holy men and women in Sigrid Undset’s Essays for Our Time.

Stephen Sparrow reveals much of Undset’s own biographical detail and how this influenced her writing in Sigrid Undset: Catholic Viking.

But the best essay I’ve read on Sigrid Undset so far is David Warren’s meditation on womanhood, motherhood, and Kristin Lavransdatter. I don’t agree with everything he says (I rather enjoyed the new translation but am thinking I might have to give the old one a go), but David gets Kristin the character, gets Kristin the novel, and gets the way that life is refracted through both.

Read David Warren, then read Sigrid Undset.

Published at 1:45 pm on Wednesday 27 March 2019. Categories: Books Church Tags: , , , , , .
Comments

I had the privilege of working for five years until his death in 2009 with Fr. Stanley L. Jaki, OSB, the priest and physicist, a member of the Pontifical Academy of Science.

In his later years, Fr. Jaki became very impressed with the Catholic witness of Sigrid Undset, so much so that he wrote a considerable book, “Sigrid Undset’s Quest for Truth (2007). He also wrote a pamphlet on her entitled “Through Moral Crises to Catholicism” (2006). Fr. Jaki writes about his discovery of Undset’s work in the second supplement (2009) to his intellectual biography, A Mind’s Matter (2001). All of these books are published by Real view Books, whose website is easily found on the internet.

Thanks to Fr. Jaki I too was able to explore Undset’s writings, a wonderful experience.
John Beaumont

— John Beaumont 28 Jan 2020 7:32 pm
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