“I have been unfaithful to my husband.” Mrs. Marta Oulie (published in 1907). Sigrid Undset (1882-1949)
The above opening statement that introduces the referenced literary work by Sigrid Undset may seem, at first glance, to be an inappropriate quote, upon which a blog devoted to commentary from a traditional perspective is based. To better grasp her significance in world literature, I referenced the year of publication (1907). Even at that time, it was considered scandalous to reference adultery, especially as an opening statement in a novel. Though scandalous, it was not an unusual subject for literary treatment. Thus, as a successfully published novelist at the age of twenty-five, she had a promising future. What could be expected from a novelist who would go on to live for another forty-two years? Much, it turns out, but not in the way of all flesh. Her way was a journey, from skeptical secularism to a deeper understanding of the human heart, and eventually found her rest in a religious awakening, responding to the “voice” of God, calling her to something deeper. Ms. Undset’s literary output was considerable. Her personal life and the themes in her books have considerable overlap. She deserves to be better known – and read – for insights into the human condition, particularly the expectations and role of women in contemporary society.
Just as the early years of future canonized saints are illuminated by the roseate light of foreknowledge in their hagiographies, so the curriculum vitae of a Nobel Laureate will get selectively edited and adorned by those who knew her as relative, friend, coworker, or struggling writer trying to find her voice. There are several versions of Sigrid Undset’s life story that could be told: Sigrid Undset as Modernist; as Medievalist; as Norwegian chronicler; as Catholic apologist; as folklorist; as historian and recognized authority of Northern (i.e., Nordic) Ways – of Norway, Old Norse, Old Icelandic, and their epic sagas; as war-torn refugee; as international human rights advocate; as voyager returning: her final journey home.
EARLY YEARS
Born in Denmark in 1882, her family moved to Norway when she was two, where she would spend the rest of her life, except for short stays in Rome and in the United States. In her early years growing up in the Norwegian capital, Oslo (it was known as Kristiania until 1925), she learned and absorbed much of her knowledge of Norwegian culture, folklore, and history from her father, the Norwegian archaeologist Ingvald Martin Undset (1853–1893). When Sigrid was eleven years old, her father died after a long illness. Besides the emotional setback from the loss of her father, this meant she had to find an alternative to getting a university education. At the age of fifteen, she enrolled in a one-year secretarial course. She then obtained work as a secretary with an engineering company in Kristiania. She would work for the company for as long as it would take for her to earn income as a writer sufficient to “give up her day job.” For the next ten years, she worked at the firm, ‘moonlighting’ as a novelist. This job would be the only job she would ever hold in the employ of another.
UNDSET AS MODERNIST
During her first year employed as an office worker, at age sixteen, she found time to study old Norse sagas and folklore, which would culminate in her first novel, set in Medieval Denmark, and was ready for publication by the year she turned twenty-two years of age. Although it was turned down by the publishing house, she completed a second novel three years later, which was accepted by the publisher. At eighty pages, the novel was much shorter than the earlier submission, and focused on a contemporary middle-class married woman in contemporary Kristiana, especially in relation to “love of the immoral kind”, referenced in the incipit statement quoted in the title above – Fru Marta Oulie.
Although nominally raised in the Lutheran Church, her Christianity was a mere formality. During the period up until World War I, she lived the life of a secular intellectual, skeptical in all things, and finding the faith of her childhood uncompelling, because, as she perceived it, there were as many Lutheran Faiths as there were individual ministers preaching their own interpretation of Lutheranism.
With the publication of Fru Marta Oulie, Ms. Undset found herself placed among Norway’s most promising young female “realistic” authors, especially in the incipient women’s emancipation movement*. She continued to write “realistic” novels throughout the period ending with the outbreak of World War I, culminating in the novels Jenny, published in 1911, about a woman artist, failing to find love in her life, ends up committing suicide; and Spring, published in 1914. The latter work is about success, but not the type of success that would have endeared her to the proto-feminists of her time. It tells the story of a woman who succeeds in saving both herself and her love from a serious matrimonial crisis, and then going on to create with her husband a loving, secure family. These books, with their themes of love in relationship and in family, placed her “on the outs” and “beyond the pale” of the incipient women’s movement, and turned to other themes, for which would bring her everlasting fame.
Womens’ Emancipation
*On women’s emancipation, Canadian-born anthropologist Lionel Tiger treats the matter of emancipation in relation to actual power, in his study of male bonding in Men in Groups (published in 1969; reissued in 2002). Women first received the vote in the United States, not in heavily-populated, urban “progressive”, mostly northeastern and midwestern states, but in rural, lightly-populated states in the Rocky Mountain region. This was because men in power sponsored and supported female suffrage as an appeal to a new voter bloc, and not due to the moral convictions of male politicians. Incidentally, Wyoming, as the first state to enfranchise women, still ranks dead last in total population, and is next to last in population density, save only for Alaska.
In comparative analyses of Western European countries, Dr. Tiger notes that female suffrage was quickened by the actions of male governing officials, largely resulting from demographic (mostly male) catastrophes arising out of two world wars, rather than through protests and palavering about female representation in legislative bodies. Dr. Tiger notes that upon initial surges of women legislators representing five percent of all legislators, their share declined in subsequent elections, stabilizing at 2-3%. Incidentally, reasons for the decline – and overall lower success rate in getting elected – has more to do with female voting behavior, rather than the action of men, powerful or otherwise.
UNDSET AS MEDIEVALIST
The work for which she is best remembered, and for which she would be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature (1928), was for a trilogy of novels on a fictional character, Kristin Lavransdatter, written and published under the following titles: The Wreath, published in 1920; The Wife, published in 1921; and The Cross, published in 1922. Set in Medieval fourteenth century Norway at the time of the Black Death, the title character’s life is told in rich detail from childhood through the arrival of the Bubonic Plague, which finally took her life. Besides being rich in characterization, and with an eye for detail on her native country’s flora and fauna, her ethnological researches evoked a past when Norway was a predominately Catholic country, as evoked by characters sense of guilt and sin, pervading daily life. Having largely abandoned ‘realistic’ themes, she looked to other milieus in a search for meaning, especially in the aftermath of the horrendous death tolls of the First World War, and the worldwide Spanish Flu epidemic which tolled the deaths of millions more worldwide. After sufficient reflection on her search for meaning in a meaningless world, she humbled herself to receive instruction in the Catholic Faith, and was received into the Catholic Church in 1924.
Her next project was equally ambitious. With a newfound faith that offered her meaning and grounded in a “less realistic, but more religious anthropology”, she planned another multi-volume chronicle on Medieval Norway’s people’s encounter with the Black Death – but with less inexplicability than Kristin Lavransdattar and her fictional compeers. The series of four books about a fictional character The Master of Hestviken was written after Undset’s conversion. Although the setting is contemporary with Kristin Lavransdattar, The Master of Hestviken explicitly plays up religious themes of the main character’s relations with God and his deep feeling of sin. During this period when Norway was Catholic, Ms. Undset portrayed clergy and monks as actively listening, offering counseling, and were ministering to broken bodies and souls in the most exemplary ways. The tetralogy of The Master of Hestviken was published as The Axe (1925); The Snake Pit (1926); In the Wilderness (1927); and The Son Avenger (1928).
For what was considered her masterpiece, Kristin Lavransdattar, Sigrid Undset received the 1928 Nobel Prize in Literature “for her powerful descriptions of Northern life during the Middle Ages”. In later years her Medieval writings would be praised for their ethnological accuracy.
UNDSET AS NOBEL LAUREATE
Ms. Undset’s life resembles a reality, or truth that, in many ways, is stranger than the fictional lives of her books’ many characters. In reviewing her life and the corpus of her output, both cover an entire range of motifs, plots, or themes in literature: comedy; overcoming the monster; the quest; rags to riches; rebirth; tragedy; voyage and return.
- life as comedy (frank sexuality mingled with moral qualms and guilt);
- overcoming the monster (the “Catholic Lady” versus women’s emancipation);
- the quest (her search for meaning);
- rags to riches (Nobel Prize winner);
- rebirth (her ‘return to the future’ in depicting contemporary twentieth century life, and her religious writings {under the aspect of eternity}),
- tragedy (death of her father, failed marriage ending in divorce, death of son and daughter);
- voyage and return (refugee from war, exile, human rights advocate, the return home, rest, the final journey).
For the next twenty years, she would continue to chronicle the petty but poignant details of daily middle- and working-class Norwegian life. She decided to return to ‘Modern Realism’, in an aggiornamento (bringing up-to-date) application of her newfound faith of sin and guilt, betrayal and reconciliation, hope and renewal to the predicament of modern Man. In the aftermath fame of a Nobel Laureate, she had an international standing, which gave her a platform to be taken seriously, despite her moniker as “the Catholic Lady”. In recognition of her fame that drew international attention to a country known mostly for its fjords and frozen highlands, she was appointed to head the Norwegian Authors’ Union‘s Literary Council from 1933 through 1935, and eventually served as the union’s chairwoman from 1936 until 1940, when war forced her to flee the country.
With her fame and worldwide recognition as a novelist and storyteller, she could have “retired” to a much earned, leisurely pace of work after her well-earned successes from Kristin Lavransdattar, and The Master of Hestviken,** (the former has been translated into more than eighty languages, making it one of the most read novels in history). She undertook new projects reflecting her new-found faith, applying lessons she learned from her own discernment, and from her meetings with English writers G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, as well as from the American novelist, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.
** Without ever attending a university, she had, as a young unknown, unpublished writer, traveled to distant churches and graveyards within her own country to gather data on births, deaths, and related population records; and learned Old Norse and Old Icelandic to read sagas of ruling dynasties and landed, noble families. Much of her “fieldwork” was original and of first impression – later validated by tomes of archaeological and anthropological studies, confirming her descriptions of daily life as portrayed in Medieval Norway.
Her ‘post Laureate’ workload remained considerable. They are typologized below, by criteria, reflecting their eclecticism:
List of Works, by Genre or Timeframe, published after her Laureate year 1928
BACK TO THE FUTURE. Contemporary Norway: The Wild Orchid, 1931; The Burning Bush, 1932; Ida Elisabeth, 1932; The Faithful Wife, 1937; Images in a Mirror, 1938; Men, Women and Places, 1939
RETURN TO THE PAST. Historical Fact and Fiction: Madame Dorthea, 1939 (First volume of uncompleted novel, set in eighteenth-century Norway); True and Untrue and Other Norse Tales, 1945
THE ETERNAL PRESENT. Christian Apologetics: Saga of Saints, 1934; Stages on the Road, 1934; Catherine of Siens, 1951 (Posthumously)
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL: The Longest Years, 1935; Happy Times in Norway, 1942
WAR REFUGEE, CRITIC OF NATIONAL SOCIALISM, THE JOURNEY HOME
When German troops invaded Norway in 1940, she fled the country into neutral Sweden, and eventually spent the war years in the United States as a refugee from the German occupation of her country. She had been a virulent critic of National Socialism and Hitler’s racial policies, and thus knew she would be in the first wave of roundups by the Gestapo. She also was a critic of the new Soviet state for its atheistic ideology, and acted on that belief. In the aftermath of the division of spoils from the German-Soviet invasions of Poland, Joseph Stalin turned northwestward to invade Finland, touching off the Winter War, in which Finland held on over the winter of 1939-1940 until overwhelming force was brought to bear. Undset supported the Finnish war effort by donating her Nobel Prize in January 1940.
Although she continued to speak out on behalf of her country and suffering people during her stay in the United States, she was losing that inner fire that had powered her work. The death of her oldest son in battle against German troops in 1940, and the death of her daughter, ‘broke’ her as a woman and mother, and never completed her last project – Madame Dorthea. She never wrote another word. With her work done, she returned home to her beloved Lillehammer, where she had done her most productive labors over the previous three decades. She died in 1949, and was buried with her son and daughter, in graves marked by three black crosses.
