After months spent acclimatizing on the lower slopes . . . and further months reddening my corpuscles at a lofty base camp . . . I am now poised for the final assault. Scaling the steep Volume III to its summit, Your New Favorite Writer will become one of five or six living human beings to have read Kristin Lavransdatter, the Norse epic by Sigrid Undset. I may even become the only person since the War to have read it in English translation.

This is no mean feat, Dear Reader. I have been working at it, on and off, for years. 

Once  achieved, it will be the obscurest feather in my literary cap. But it portends; for Kristin Lavransdatter is so pure in its essence, so majestic in concept, that the Swedish Academy awarded Ms. Undset—an inscrutable saga all by herself—the 1928 Nobel Prize for Literature. 

Perhaps this would be of little interest to you, Gentle Reader, were it not for your secret yearning to use Kristin Lavransdatter as esoteric chatter at cocktail parties. Yet the obstacles, till now, have been great.

Happily, I can give you the essentials, free of charge, thus sparing you the considerable pains I myself have endured in the conquest. Don’t mention it. Glad to do it.

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Herewith, then, Kristin Lavransdatter:

To begin with, Marley was dead. Whoops, wrong story. Let me try again.

Kristin Lavransdatter was a little girl living in the days when Norwegians were starting to take up bishops and, with some reluctance, leave off dragons. Those were also the days when your last name told who your father was. 

Kristin’s father was named Lavrans, the Norsk equivalent of Lawrence or Laurence. Had he been Lavrans Olivierssøn, perhaps he would have been a great Shakesperian actor. However, Shakespeare had not been born yet, and Lavrans was actually Lavrans Bjørgulfssøn. He had to settle for being a wealthy Norwegian landowner. But I digress.

Lavrans’s daughter, Kristin, was a beautiful, beguiling, and willful child. Her beauty, guile, and willfulness were sufficient to require three volumes of dense Norwegian prose which, when translated into English, does not make any sense. 

But bear in mind, it is Nobel prize material. Or it was, ninety-five years ago.

Kristin had a number of childhood adventures which firmed up in her mind the predicament of being a beautiful young maiden enmeshed in the aristocratic life of fourteenth-century Norway—which was mostly a succession of idylls in upland meadows, snowy forests, and scree-covered mountain slopes. As she grew into a gorgeous teenager, she was stupefyingly bored and thus fell in love with the raffish, error-prone Erlend Nikulaussøn. 

Now, here is a curious point to ponder, Fair Reader: Kristin was the loveliest creature in all Gudbrandsdal, which is saying something; for those dales are filled with lovely Norwegian creatures. My point is, she could have had her choice among all sorts of wonderful husbands and good providers—many with great ancestral lands of their own. So who did she take up with but Erlend Nikulaussøn—a man acknowledged by all to be capable and charming, but then everybody also knew he couldn’t keep his head on straight.

It was the stuff of which good soap operas are made. Once Kristin and Erlend did the deed, of course she got pregnant, and her wise old father, Lavrans Bjørgulfssøn, swallowed his pride and gave her hand in marriage to this bounder, Erlend, from Trøndelag. 

The remaining two-and-a-half books explore in a charming, rustic way, every nook and cranny of the consequences flowing from that first-act mistake.

Somewhere in the second book author Undset lets slip that Erlend—tired of the routine tasks of a wealthy landholder married to a beautiful, beguiling, and willful woman—has been dabbling in politics. Medieval Norwegian politics, that is, of the kind that may cost a man his head if the legal king finds out about it. Well, that fact, of course, adds to Kristin’s trials. 

All through this endless parade of elephantine, Erlendesque blunders, Kristin keeps her cool. She scrupulously refrains from criticizing her husband on the principle that—well, I’m not quite sure what the principle is, but at any rate it prevents her giving him any good advice. Which is too bad, because he sure could use some.

You get the drift. I am sure you do, Dear Reader, since you are among the sharper knives in the drawer.

Kristin Lavransdatter exemplifies the best traditions of confused medieval nobles and gives us—what exactly does it give us? An enduring chronicle, shall we say, and let it go at that. 

If, in the course of finishing Volume III, I discover anything heart-stoppingly new and unexpected, I’ll be sure to let you know. 

In the meantime, should you wish to begin your own ascent into post-Viking Norsk literature, just email me, including your postal address. I’ll send you the first two volumes, like new except for the very occasional ketchup stain.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer