Slate on Kristin Lavransdatter's wayward heart

In an unsentimental novel

A long trilogy about life in medieval Norway, written by the Norwegian writer (and future target of the invading Germans) Sigrid Undset, Kristian Lavransdatter describes the life of a young woman that did not work out as well as it might, partly from her own choices. This review, in the usually very secular site Slate, was written by religion writer Ruth Graham.

This trilogy includes illicit sex, affairs, a church fire, an attempted rape, ocean voyages, rebellious virgins cooped up in a convent, predatory priests, an attempted human sacrifice, floods, fights, murders, violent suicide, a gay king, drunken revelry, the Bubonic Plague, deathbed confessions, and sex that makes its heroine ache “with astonishment — that this was the iniquity that all the songs were about.” . . .

As flawed as Kristin is — she is proud, lustful, brooding, and fails to live up to her own moral standards — she is a devout believer, and the books are intimately concerned with her relationship with God. Undset was a Catholic convert, and one of the most remarkable things about the trilogy is that it’s a rare literary depiction of religious people that is both empathetic and unsentimental. . . .

Reading Kristin Lavransdatter made me realize how rarely I’ve encountered a serious 20^th- or 21^st-century novel that recognizes that “following your heart” might not be the key to happiness or goodness. The annals of historical fiction are filled with headstrong heroines who struggle between their own desires and the strictures of their fuddy-duddy communities, of course. But the revelatory thing about Undset’s approach is that it does not presume the community is wrong.

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