Sigrid Undset (
May 20,
1882 –
June 10,
1949) was a
Norwegian novelist who won the
Nobel Prize in Literature for
1928.
Undset was born in
Kalundborg,
Denmark, but her family moved to Norway when she was two years old. In
1924, she converted to
Catholicism. She fled Norway for the
United States in
1940 because of her opposition to
Nazi Germany and the
German occupation, but returned after
World War II ended in
1945.
Her best-known work is
Kristin Lavransdatter, a
modernist trilogy about life in
Scandinavia in the
Middle Ages. The book was set in medieval
Norway and was published from
1920 to
1922 in three volumes.
Kristin Lavransdatter portrays the life of woman from birth until death. Undset was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for this trilogy as well as her two books about
Olav Audunssøn, published in
1925 and
1927.
Undset experimented with
modernist tropes such as
stream of consciousness in her novel, although the original
English translation by Charles Archer excised many of these passages. In
1997, the first volume of
Tiina Nunnally's new translation of the work won the
PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in the category of translation. The names of each volume were translated by Archer as
The Bridal Wreath,
The Mistress of Husaby, and
The Cross, and by Nunally as
The Wreath,
The Wife, and
The Cross.
Biography Sigrid Undset was born on 20 May 1882, at Kalundborg, in Denmark, at her mother's handsome childhood home on the market place of the small town. Sigrid was the eldest of the couple's three daughters. She came to Norway at the age of two, when her parents moved on account of her father's illness, which forced him to give up further scientific travel in Europe.
She grew up in Kristiania, the capital (the name was changed back to Oslo in 1925). The first eleven years of her life were strongly influenced by her father's serious illness but also by his extensive historical knowledge. At an early age, Sigrid learnt not only the secrets of archaeology, but also the mysteries of the Norse sagas and Scandinavian folk songs.
Her father died, only 40 years old, when she was 11. Her mother was left to cope single-handedly with three young daughters, on very slim means. This family tragedy left its mark on Sigrid Undset's childhood and adolescence. Her hopes of a university education had to be abandoned. Having passed the intermediate school (Middelskole) examination, she took a 1-year secretarial course, and, at the age of 16, got a job as secretary with a major German-owned engineering company in Kristiania. It was necessary for her to earn money to help her mother and her two younger sisters. She worked with the same company for 10 years as a secretary, gradually assuming a highly trusted position. There were times when she detested office work, feeling she was wasting her time and her youth. But it gave her insight into a major industrial enterprise, taught her how to work systematically, and made her into an expert typist. She later exhibited a considerable talent for organisation, both as housewife and subsequently as chairman of the Society of Norwegian Authors. Furthermore, systematic office routine undoubtedly taught her a good deal about how to proceed with major literary works such as her serial novels.
But the ten years of office work were a torment to Sigrid Undset. Late at night, and during weekends and holidays, she stole the time to write. Sigrid was no more than 16 years old when she made her first hesitant attempt at writing a novel set in the Nordic Middle Ages. For several years, she wrestled with the subject. At the same time, she read a lot, acquiring a thorough knowledge of Nordic as well as foreign literature, English in particular.
She was deeply moved by Shakespeare, enthusiastic about Chaucer, attracted by legends of King Arthur. But she also immersed herself in the work of Scandinavian writers, such as Ibsen, Strindberg, Brandes, and English authors such as the Brontë sisters and Jane Austen. On her own initiative and in her spare time she thus acquired a sound knowledge of the art of writing, preparing herself for what she felt from an early age to be her "fate" in life.
The manuscript of Undset's first novel was ready by the time she was 22. It was the result of burning the midnight oil for many years. It was an historical novel set in the Denmark of the Middle Ages, clearly of the rather romantic type. The manuscript was turned down by the publishing house, and to her this was a devastating blow. All the same, two years later, she had completed another manuscript; much less voluminous this time, only 80 pages. She had put aside the Middle Ages, and had instead produced a realistic description of a woman with a petit-bourgeois background in contemporary Kristiania. The title was Fru Marta Aulie, with an opening sentence which scandalised the readers: I have been unfaithful to my husband. These were the words of the book's main character. This book was also refused at first, but after the intervention of a well-known writer of the time, it was subsequently accepted.
Thus, at the age of 25, Sigrid Undset made her literary debut with a short, realistic novel on adultery, set against a contemporary background. It created a stir, and she found herself ranked as a promising young author in Norway. During the years up to 1919, Undset published a number of novels set in contemporary Kristiania. The 10 years at the office had been lonely and difficult ones, but they had given her a foothold in the world of unimportant, everyday people; those who bravely, if not necessarily heroically, strove to find some happiness in life. Undset was a shy, rather introverted young woman with few personal friends. But she had unusually sharp eyes, she saw people, and she saw through them. Her way of breaking out of her loneliness was to take long strolls in and around Kristiania, both east and west, and she came to know it better than most. Her contemporary novels of the period 1907-1918 include all this -- the city and its insignificant inhabitants, the monotonous boarding-house existence of secretaries in a gloomy town, their longing for a little warmth and love, and their brave, not to say heroic, rejection of seediness. These are the stories of working people, of trivial family destinies, of the relationship between parents and children, written with warmth, but soberly, and completely unsentimentally. Her main subjects are women and their love. Or, as she herself put it -- in her typically curt and ironic manner -- "the immoral kind" (of love).
This realistic period culminated in the novels
Jenny in 1911 and
Vaaren (Spring) in 1914. The first is about a woman painter who, as a result of romantic crises, believes that she is wasting her life, and in the end commits suicide. The other tells of a woman who succeeds in saving both herself and her love from a serious matrimonial crisis, finally creating a secure family. These books placed Undset more or less clearly apart from the incipient women's emancipation movement in Europe -- perhaps not exactly against it, but on an entirely different level.
Undset's books sold well from the start, and after the publication of her third book, she quit the office job, and prepared to live on her income as a writer. Having been granted a writer's scholarship, she set out on a lengthy journey in Europe. After short stops in Denmark and Germany, she continued to Italy, arriving in Rome in December 1909, where she remained for 9 months.
Undset's parents had had a close relationship with Rome. As a matter of fact, Sigrid should have been born in Rome while her parents lived there in 1882. But just before her birth, her father became suddenly and seriously ill, her parents travelled north in a great hurry to her mother's home at Kalundborg, and that is where Sigrid was born. However, Undset herself very likely felt that her proper place of birth was Rome, and during her stay there in 1909 she followed in her parents' footsteps.
The encounter with Southern Europe meant a great deal to her. She immediately made friends within the circle of Scandinavian artists and writers in Rome, she became more open, and more outgoing and lively in her relations with other people.
In Rome, she met Anders Castus Svarstad, a Norwegian painter, whom she married 2 or 3 years later. She was then 30 and, most likely, he was her first love. Svarstad was nine years older than her, he was married, and had a wife and three children in Norway. Their meeting must have been a case of love at first sight, but it was nearly three years before Svarstad got his divorce.
They were married in 1912, and went to stay in London for 6 months. Svarstad painted, and Undset developed strong ties with English art and letters, which were to be of decisive importance to her for the rest of her life. From London, they returned to Rome, where Sigrid's first child was born in January 1913. It was a boy, and he was named after his father.
Marriage, and the other children who came later, meant a great deal to Sigrid Undset, both as a person and as a woman. But it was a serious dilemma for the creative artist. In the years of marriage up to 1919, she had three children of her own, and a large, busy household to look after; one which also included Svarstad's three children by his first marriage. They were difficult years for Sigrid Undset. Her second child, a girl, was mentally handicapped, and Svarstad's mentally handicapped son also lived with them. She kept an open and busy house for the large family and for old and new friends.
At the same time, she continued writing at night, after the others had gone to bed, finishing her last realistic novels and collections of short stories. She also entered the public debate on the most topical themes: women's emancipation, ethical and moral issues. She had considerable polemical gifts, and was categorically critical of emancipation as it was developing, and of the moral and ethical decline she felt was threatening in the wake of the First World War, which was raging beyond the shores of neutral Norway.
In 1919, she moved to Lillehammer, a small town in the Gudbrandsdalen, a valley in south-east Norway, taking her two children with her. She was expecting her third child. The idea was that she should take a rest at Lillehammer and move back to Kristiania as soon as Svarstad had their new house in order. However, it was not to be.
Instead, the marriage broke down. In August 1919, Sigrid Undset gave birth to her third child, at Lillehammer. She decided to make Lillehammer her home, and within two years, Bjerke-bæk, her large, beautiful house, was completed. It was a property consisting of three large, handsome houses of traditional Norwegian timber architecture, and a big, fenced garden with lovely views of the town and the villages around. Her ailing daughter and the two boys now had a secure and exceptionally beautiful home. At last, after years of moves and changes, Sigrid Undset, the writer, had a quiet place to which she could retreat from the world at large in order to do the one thing she now knew she was really good at -- writing.
Marriage and the First World War were to change Undset's attitudes. During those difficult years she had experienced a crisis of faith, almost imperceptible at first, then increasingly strong. The crisis led her from clear agnostic scepticism, by way of painful uneasiness about the ethical decline of the time, towards Christianity. She had grown up in a tolerant, free-thinking home, and had herself been a sceptical free-thinker, though without the blind faith of the time in science and materialism being the be-all and end-all.
It would appear that Sigrid Undset had had a personal religious experience at one time or another during those years. In all her writing one senses an observant eye for the mystery of life, for that which cannot be explained either by reason or common sense. At the back of her sober, almost brutal realism, there is always an inkling of something unanswerable. It would seem that this recognition of mystery resulted in a personal religious experience. At any rate, this crisis changed her view of Christianity. She no longer believed that man had created God, but had come to believe that God created man.
It was not the Lutheran Church, the Protestant State Church of Norway, where she herself had been christened, that became her choice. She joined the Roman Catholic Church in November 1924, having received thorough instruction from the local Catholic priest in her home district. She was 42 years old at the time.
In Norway Sigrid Undset's conversion to Catholicism was not only considered sensational; it also had an air of scandal about it. It was also noted abroad, where her name was becoming known through the international success of
Kristin Lavransdatter. Today, we can only smile at that sensation. But at that time there were practically no Catholics in Norway, an almost obsessively Protestant country. "Papism" was held in contempt, even feared by large sections of the community, and not only by the Lutheran church, but actually just as much by free-thinkers, and among those more or less closely connected with Marxism, Leninism, and socialism. The attacks were quite vicious at times, with the result that Sigrid Undset's polemical gifts were aroused. For many years she participated in the public debate, in fact going out of her way to join in it, in almost total defence of her Roman Church.
However, it is not, after all, the Mistress of Bjerke-bæk or the Catholic lady who interest us most when it comes to Sigrid Undset, it is Sigrid Undset the writer, and this is a productive period for her.
As soon as her third child had been born, and she had a secure roof over her head, she started on
Kristin Lavransdatter, a major project indeed. She was completely at home in the subject matter, having written a short novel at an earlier stage, about a period in Norwegian history closer to the pagan times. She had also published a version in Norwegian of the Arthurian legends, from the British/Celtic Middle Ages. She had studied Norse manuscripts and medieval texts, and had closely investigated medieval churches and monasteries, both at home and abroad. She was now an authority on the period she was struggling to portray, and a very different person from the 22-year old who had written her first novel on the Middle Ages.
What had happened to her in the meantime has to do with more than history and literature, it has just as much to do with her development as a person. She had experienced love, and passion, to the bitter end. She had been in despair over a sick world in the throes of the bloodbath of the First World War. When she started on
Kristin Lavransdatter in 1919, she knew what life was about.
Kristin Lavransdatter is, of course, an historical novel. But it is more than that. The historical novel aspect is not even the most important part of it. The historical background is precise and realistic enough, and never romanticised. This is by no means a writer's escape from the contemporary scene into vague longings for the past. Instead, in these three volumes Undset transfers the feelings -- well known to herself -- of happiness and sorrow, of ecstasy and despair back into a distant past. Not in order to romanticise them, though obviously Undset's choice of the Middle Ages is a result of her admiration of the rock-firm faith that characterized this period.
She transfers the protagonists to a distant past in order to establish the distance the author needs, in order to create a work of art from her own strong feelings and strict thoughts. She was aware of being on the threshold of something new in her authorship. She searches for, and finds, the necessary distance by going back to the Middle Ages. «I am finding my feet, and quite unaided at that», she wrote to a friend.
It is life's mystery, as she knows it from her own experience, that she writes about in
Kristin Lavransdatter. That is why these 1,400 pages, as well as the 1,200 on
Olav Auduns-søn are timeless. Her characters are men and women of flesh and blood, they could well be our neighbours today. And Undset has put them in a natural setting which is ours to this day. It is the city of Oslo she knew so well, the valley - Gudbrandsdalen - that she loved, and her father's Trøndelag region.
It was after she had broken out of her marriage that Sigrid Undset became mature enough to write her masterpiece. In the years between 1920 and 1927 she first published the 3-volume
Kristin, and then the 4-volume
Olav (Audunssøn). Simultaneously with this creative process, she was engaged in trying to find the meaning of her own life, finding the answer in the God of Christianity. As she herself put it: "He brought me in from the outposts."
At the end of this creative eruption, Sigrid Undset entered calmer waters. After 1929, she completed a series of novels set in contemporary Oslo, with a strong Catholic element. She selected her themes from the small, though interesting Catholic community in Norway. But here also, the main theme is love. She also published a number of weighty historical works, which undoubtedly did their bit in putting the history of Norway into a more sober perspective. In addition, she translated several Icelandic sagas into Norwegian and published a few literary essays, mainly on English literature, of which a long essay on the Brontë sisters, and one on D.H. Lawrence, are especially worth mentioning. These are not great literature, but they are strong and inspiring.
In 1934, she published
Eleven Years Old, an autobiographical work. With a minimum of camouflage, it tells the story of her own childhood in Kristiania, of her home, rich in intellectual values and love, and of her sick father. It is one of the most fetching Norwegian books ever written about a little girl, surpassed by very few. Sigrid Undset was passing from strength to strength.
At the end of the thirties she started on a new book, an historical novel set in 18th century Scandinavia. Only the first volume,
Madame Dorthea, was published in 1939. The Second World War broke out. It was to break her, both as a person and as a writer. She never finished the set of 18th century novels. The War had sapped all her strength.
During the
Winter War Undset supported the Finnish cause by donating on 25 January, 1940 her Nobel medal to Finland
[1].
When Germany invaded Norway in April 1940, she was forced to flee. She had strongly opposed Hitler and Nazism since the early '30s, and from an early date her books were banned in Germany. She had no wish to be taken hostage by the Germans, and fled to Sweden. Her elder son, Anders, was killed in action at the age of 27, in April 1940, only a few kilometres from their home at Bjerke-bæk. He was an officer in the Norwegian army and was killed in an encounter with German troops. Her sick daughter had died shortly before the outbreak of the War. Bjerke-bæk was occupied by the German Army, and used as officers' quarters during the War.
In 1940, Sigrid Undset and her younger son left neutral Sweden for the United States. There, she untiringly pleaded her occupied country's cause, in writing and speeches. She returned to Norway after the liberation in 1945, worn out. She lived for another four years, but she never wrote another word.
Undset died at the age of 67 in
Lillehammer, Norway, where she had lived from 1919 through 1940.
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