Sigrid Undset

Sigrid Undset: The Office Clerk Who Rebuilt the Middle Ages

On 25 January 1940 Sigrid Undset gave away her Nobel Prize money to help Finland fight the Soviet invasion. Three months later Germany invaded Norway, her eldest son was killed in action at twenty-seven defending a bridge, the Wehrmacht took her house, and she escaped east — across Sweden, then the entire Soviet Union by Trans-Siberian railway — to arrive in America as a political refugee. She was fifty-eight. She had already written the novel that would outlive all of it.

An Archaeologist's Daughter in an Office

She was born on 20 May 1882 in Kalundborg, Denmark, the eldest of three daughters, and the family moved to Norway when she was two. Her father, Ingvald Martin Undset, was a Norwegian archaeologist and medieval historian who had taken his doctorate in 1881 with a thesis on the beginnings of the Iron Age and worked at Norway's Museum of Antiquities. He died when she was eleven, and with him went the family's money and any prospect of university. Her mother, Charlotte, kept an intellectual household on reduced means.

Undset had attended a progressive co-educational school run by Ragna Nielsen, whose ideology she disliked enough to walk away from it at fourteen. She went to commercial school instead, and at sixteen she took secretarial work with an engineering company in Kristiania. She stayed ten years — from roughly seventeen to twenty-seven — and detested it. The Middle Ages her father had studied stayed in her head the whole time.

Scandal in Modern Dress

*Fru Marta Oulie* appeared in 1907 and opened with a confession of adultery, which was enough to scandalise Norwegian readers on the first line. *Den lykkelige alder* followed in 1908, then *Jenny* (1911) and *Vaaren* (1914). These are contemporary realist novels about women's lives, work and choices, and they made her reputation before a single knight appeared in her fiction. A scholarship took her to Germany and Italy. In Rome in 1909 she met the Norwegian painter Anders Castus Svarstad, thirteen years older and married; they wed in 1912 after his divorce. She bore three children, two households merged, and the family included Svarstad's three children by his first marriage, two of whom were mentally handicapped. The marriage failed. In 1919 she took her children to Lillehammer while Svarstad stayed in Italy.

Kristin

At Bjerkebæk in Lillehammer, settled by 1921, she built the thing she had been carrying since childhood. *Kristin Lavransdatter* came out in three volumes between 1920 and 1922: the life of one woman in medieval Norway, followed from birth to death, with the whole society — farm, church, marriage, plague, politics — assembled around her. The four-part *Olav Audunssøn* cycle followed in 1925–27, translated into English as *The Master of Hestviken*. These are not costume dramas. Undset had her father's research discipline and used it to reconstruct the material and legal texture of the fourteenth century, then applied thoroughly modern psychological technique, including stream of consciousness, to the people living inside it.

The Catholic Lady

She had been raised in a secular, atheist home, and moved through the crisis of her marriage and the First World War from clear agnostic scepticism toward Christianity. In November 1924, aged forty-two, she was received into the Roman Catholic Church and later became a lay Dominican. In overwhelmingly Lutheran Norway this was a public event and not a welcome one; she acquired the nickname "The Catholic Lady" and spent years writing polemical essays defending the position. The fiction changed too. *Gymnadenia* (1929), *Den brændende busk* (1930) and *Ida Elisabeth* (1932) turned, in the Nobel Foundation's own description, apologetic in character — contemporary stories argued through faith.

The Prize, Finland, and Exile

The Swedish Academy gave her the 1928 Nobel Prize in Literature "principally for her powerful descriptions of Northern life during the Middle Ages." She had been nominated through Helga Eng of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. She had also been attacking Nazi ideology since the early 1930s, which put her on a list. After the money went to Finland in January 1940 and Norway fell in April, she reached Brooklyn Heights, joined St. Ansgar's Scandinavian Catholic League, befriended the novelist Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and spent the war writing and speaking on behalf of occupied Norway and of Europe's Jews. Friends at home quietly hid her library while German troops occupied Bjerkebæk.

She came home in 1945 and received the Grand Cross of the Order of St. Olav. She never published another word. She broke down in May 1948 and died on 10 June 1949 of kidney inflammation in Lillehammer, the town she had lived in from 1919 to 1940. Three black crosses mark her grave at Mesnali.

Why Sigrid Is Called a Genius

The Nobel committee praised description, not intellect, and the phrasing is telling: "powerful descriptions of Northern life during the Middle Ages." What that undersells is the synthesis. Undset did two incompatible things at once. She reconstructed the fourteenth century with the evidentiary rigour of the archaeologist's household she grew up in — the law, the farming, the liturgy, the property arrangements, all load-bearing rather than decorative — and she then filled it with people rendered by the newest tools available to her, including stream of consciousness, so that her medieval characters have interior lives instead of period manners. Following one woman from birth to death across three volumes without the structure sagging is a feat of sustained architecture that very few novelists attempt, let alone bring off.

The counter-case should be stated. "Genius" is not a word the record puts in anyone's mouth about her, and her gift was not startling invention: it was research, patience and an unusually deep imaginative empathy, applied for years at a stretch. Her post-conversion novels became openly apologetic, and didacticism costs a novelist something. She wrote nothing at all in the last four years of her life. Her international standing dipped for decades, partly because English readers were reading a bowdlerised text — it took Tiina Nunnally's 1997 translation, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award and restored passages earlier versions had cut, to show Anglophone readers what the prose actually does. The genius, if the word applies, is in the discipline rather than the flash.

Legacy

*Kristin Lavransdatter* is now among the small number of historical novels that serious readers treat as literature rather than genre, and its heroine is one of the fullest female lives in European fiction. Undset's larger demonstration was that the past could be entered without condescension: that people in 1320 had complete inner weather, and that a novelist willing to do the archaeology could show it. She was, at different times, a scandalous modern realist, a medievalist, a convert polemicist and a wartime propagandist for a country under occupation, and the office clerk who hated her desk did all of it after hours.

Achievements

• Nobel Prize in Literature — 1928
• Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St. Olav‎ — 1947
• Order of the Falcon
• Notable work: Kristin Lavransdatter
• Notable work: Jenny
• Notable work: The Master of Hestviken
• Genres: historical fiction