A bit of Kristin Lavransdatter - What if she screamed now so that her voice pierced through the song and the deep, droning male voices

Since I am going to Norway for a little vacation and am reading around in the 1920s, I read the first volume of Sigrid Undset’s beloved Kristin Lavransdatter, The Wreath (1920), the story of a young woman who is a Strong Female Character even for 14th century Norway, when the women generally seem pretty strong.

I read the 2005 Tiina Nunnally translation which is obviously superior to the old one, the beloved one.  Undset wrote in a plain style with lyrical interludes, much like so many novels written today, and was sexually frank in a way that is surprisingly not so far from another novel from 1920, Women in Love, and Lawrence had to publish that by private subscription to avoid the obscenity laws that squashed The Rainbow.  The older translation is full of pseudo-medieval “aughts” and “naughts” and “thees” and “thous”; Nunnally cleans out all of that and restores substantial passages that were too sexy for the Americans and English in the 1920s, so this is “the first unabridged English translation,” Nunnally says in her translator’s note.

But it is the older translation that was beloved by a large number of readers.  It is obviously inferior, but maybe I should have read the novel that people really read, the text of the phenomenon.  Do I want the phenomenon or the novel itself?  I guess the novel itself, and I guess the new one is closer.

In the novel itself, remembering that we are in a plausible and well-researched 14th century Norway, Kristin is first a child, then a teen who is promised to one man but falls in love with a bad boy, and finally through cussedness and suffering marries the one she wants.  Those are the three parts of the book.  The ethos is what I would call feminist, a challenge from the 14th century to the 20th, and very feminine.  Kristin makes butter, Kristin cooks, Kristin goes shoe shopping.  I can see why some readers love this book, and why others are bored to tears.

Characters in The Wreath, male and female, regularly burst into tears.  “Then Kristin burst into tears” (III.6).  Kristin Lavransdatter seems to be an exercise in mentalité, an attempt to novelize not just the clothes and customs of an earlier time, but also the psychology, the ways of thinking.  The characters are meant to be a little bit alien.  They are like us, but also definitely not.

But as Dion sang so long ago, "Well, if you want to make me cry, that won't be so hard to do," and The Wreath is about a "Teenager in Love." They are not like us, but then again are.

The long wedding scene that fills roughly the last sixth of the novel is formally the most interestingly scene.  Undset parallels a carefully reconstructed wedding of the time – clothes, language, ritual – with the increasingly chaotic thoughts of the heroine.  It is a bit Expressionist.  “Kristin thought: What if she screamed now so that her voice pierced through the song and the deep, droning male voices and reverberated out over the crowd?” (III.8).  Many motifs of the novel, not necessarily so interesting by themselves, are pulled together in the wedding, at both the “material” and “psychological” levels.

I know, it is not a great recommendation – “the last thirty pages are really good!”  Well, that is one way novels work.

My favorite novelistic detail, easily: “The titmice clung to the timbered walls and hopped around on the sunny side; the pecking of their beaks resounded as they looked for flies asleep in the gaps between the wood” (III.4).  An observation, I suspect, from the 20th century, or the 19th, from Undset’s childhood, another way to link the past and present.

gleaming herring scales all over their skirts - Alexander Kielland's Skipper Worse

The novels of Alexander Kielland was recommended by JeffryHouse back when I was soliciting advice about Norwegian literature.  I tried the 1882 Skipper Worse, which was short, engaging, and useful, and sometimes even artful.  I can easily recommend it myself to people who are for some reason concentrating their attention on Norwegian fiction.  That is meant to be narrow, but it obviously includes me.

Skipper Worse is a ship captain who in the lively opening scene returns to his small town after a long absence, “the first time a ship from that area had made the journey to Rio de Janeiro” (20), so his return is a triumph.  Worse becomes entangled with the town’s severe pietistic sect.  Kielland was a left-wing reformer, so he has no qualms about making some of the pietists as villains and hypocrites, as when greedy Madam Torvestad keeps her daughter from a love match within their faith by essentially selling her to the wealthy Skipper Worse, thereby ruining his life, her life, and the lives of several others.

The horrible Madam Torvestad arranges a marriage for her younger daughter, too, this time motivated not by greed but spite.  For some reason I have been reading a lot of stories about arranged marriages lately, almost all ending (or beginning) in disaster.  But those in Skipper Worse have been the worst.

All of this was fine, but the best parts of the novel were a bit separate from the story, scenes of action in the life of the little Norwegian port – a terrible storm in Chapter 15 and the arrival of the herring fleet in Chapter 5. 

The whole warehouse was full to the rafters with men, herring, salt, and barrels.  There were shouts and yells, the clang of coopers.  The floor and stairs were always wet and  slippery with herring blood and brine, which dripped between the floors.  Herring scales covered the walls everywhere you looked, and there was a smell like the inside of a whale’s stomach.  (69)

Maybe I should have preceded that with a lunch spoiler alert.

The girls would pull their fish scarves down, so their mouths were free, talking and lightly shouting as they walked in the middle of the street, warm and red-cheeked after the work, gleaming herring scales all over their skirts.  (66)

The girls are mocking the only people in town who to not have to gut herring, the “pale and sallow youngsters” who have to go to school, crushed by “the weight of Greek and Latin books, their thoughts confounded by the demands of a long-gone culture, their brains full of grammar” (66).  One reason I wanted to read Kielland was to see at least some of Norway through a writer other than Henrik Ibsen and Knut Hamsun, both of whom were huge weirdos, but it seems Kielland is a weirdo, too, at least when it comes to Latin. 

The editor tells me that Kielland is the author of a trilogy of novels that “might well be the most searing attack on formal education ever produced,” beginning with the 1883 Gift (translated as Poison), which “attacks the teaching of Latin as the most soul destroying activity ever invented” (167).  Deeply tempting crankery, but I guess not in English.

I read the Cross-Cultural Communications edition of Skipper Worse, 2008, tr. Christopher Fauske.  Alexander Kielland is also an offshore drilling platform that suffered a catastrophic disaster.  Norwegian oil drilling rigs are named after writers.