Forbidden Fruit: Reading Kristin Lavransdatter

Prior to the journey to Iceland this past summer to take part in a storytelling gathering where my group would devote a week to exploring Sigrid Undset's wondrous trilogy, Kristin Lavransdatter, I submitted the following essay to a project concerning women's literacy and their recollection of a book that made a profound impression on them.

In the summer I spent between grades eight and nine one of my girlfriends was a classmate much more developed than I was. “Developed” in the physical sense, for she had reached puberty and I lagged behind, having skipped an earlier grade at school to find myself a child among adolescents, a girl among young women with breasts, fingernail polish, and giggled conversation about boys. I remained the bookish outcast from girl talk but was nonetheless accepted on the fringe of these female clusters because of this friend. She in turn had an older sister with a steady boyfriend, and would report in conspiratorial tones about having observed them necking, and her sister having hickeys on her neck. “Necking” and “hickeys” were hitherto not part of my vocabulary and as I didn’t want to ask for definitions, I absorbed such confidences with a silence intended to conceal ignorance. The greatest revelation about becoming a young woman, however, was the stash of True Romance and True Confession magazines that my friend had discovered when snooping in her sister’s room and from which we pilfered samples to read and discuss. These supposedly “true” magazine accounts were our connection with the world of male-female relationships beyond the bare “facts of life” and we didn’t question the authenticity of these stories that somehow combined titillation with their cautionary moral underpinnings.

It was only when I chanced, later in high school, to discover Sigrid Undset’s novel concerning the fictional life of a 14^th century woman she called Kristin Lavransdatter that the complicated world of female passion opened to me. “Passion” in the flimsy newsprint pages of True Confessions was basic, spurious, and one-dimensional; the people portrayed on those pages were shadowy and, once the magazine was set aside, completely forgettable. After devouring the contents in one afternoon while consuming potato chips, my friend and I felt sated, bored with the sameness of the stories, and returned them to the big sister’s room never to look at them again.

How Kristin Lavransdatter first came to my attention in the quiet of my high school library escapes my memory: perhaps I opened randomly to a reference to her having a lover, or to the second volume with its mention of the “fruit of sin”. But once I began, with the opening passages about Kristen’s family, her childhood, and the vivid account of her travelling one summer with her father on horseback to the family’s mountain pastures, I found myself far from the hard library chair and transported to medieval Norway. Undset’s evocative descriptions of the countryside, of the people, of Kristin’s vision on that first trip with her father, of a magical and startling maiden that her father feared might be an elfin creature, captured me utterly. Kristin’s enchantment by the beauty of the land she found herself in was translated into my enchantment by the words on the pages and the sense they gave of being in another place.

My lasting impression even now, decades later, is of hours spent in that library, day after day, devoted to reading the book through to its moving conclusion that left me sitting, choked with emotion, as the library closed that day and the librarian began turning off the lights. I can see her now: petite, dark-haired Miss H. with her large black-rimmed spectacles that made her eyes seem large and luminous. She noticed me simply sitting there and came over to ask me if I was all right, and I had to collect myself and mumble something. Doubtless she noticed what I had been reading because she merely smiled sympathetically and didn’t press me.

Why I read the book in the library instead of taking it home, I can’t recall. True, it was big and heavy, and I had a long walk to and from school each day with all my other books. Perhaps the book was on a shelf of reserved materials, and not to be borrowed, or perhaps the library was for me a more hallowed place without the interruptions and distractions of life at home. For whatever reason, my memory of the impact of the book is strongly associated with that place, where I could look out the windows to the west where the sun set earlier each day of the winter, and that time of my life.

More recently, the book came back into my life. I have been reading it to prepare for a storytelling seminar in Iceland, where five women will discuss Kristin Lavransdatter in the context of the culture and history of its heroine, and for the flavour of family devotions, sufferings, and conflicts that so enriches the Icelandic sagas.

“Passion” in the medieval Norway of Sigrid Undset’s novel added layers of meaning far beyond the True Romance caricatures of the tentative explorations of young people experiencing the onset of their body’s intricate emotional lives spurring powerful physical yearnings. New to me was not only the possibility of complete and immovable devotion to a loved one but of the depth of religious and spiritual experience. These were deeper meanings of passion: for personal salvation, for kinfolk and friends, for place, for life itself.

But Sigrid Undset’s writing had a more subtle, long-lasting effect on my life, for the way in which she captured the difficulties of being a decent human being in a troubled world. Norway in the fourteenth century, with political upheavals and the coming of the Black Death, was not my troubled world: the post-war period shadowed by the fear of atomic annihilation. Countering such troublesome realities in Kristin’s Norway were the beauty of the natural world and the sense of order and security resulting from attending carefully to daily necessities. There were the rituals related to home, family, community, and these details, so tenderly described, appealed to me especially given my own broken family life and feeling of isolation.

It was also Undset’s way of portraying her characters in all their complexity without moral judgment, with a depth of compassion that made them seem actually alive. I began, after being absorbed in that book, to look at people differently, as if they might be characters in a story that I was writing, seeing them as characters in the story of their own lives, their inner lives ultimately impenetrable except as I might imagine them. And so I began to apply my imagination to the lives of my parents, my teachers, my friends and classmates, and take clues from their expressions, their moods, their gestures, our occasional conversations. I would observe them and commit myriad small moments to memory as if they and their lives were puzzle pieces that could reveal their whole being once put together in all the complexity of being human.

Even though my parents and indeed all the people in my life and world were so much different from Kristin’s, when I read her story I was both “inside” her and with her, saw her world “slant” as it were and inspired by her story, would imagine in my head a novel of my own life as Undset might write it. I became Kristen Lavransdatter, tried to become like Sigrid Undset, and my mind opened to the powers of the words of fiction to create other worlds.

I read about the saintly wandering monk Edvin, so important to Kristin’s spiritual growth, and thought of my own uncle Ed and the simplicity and suffering in his life, constructing a story from what I knew about him. Kristin’s plump room-mate at the convent put me in mind of my classmate who introduced me to True Confessions. The boys in my classes through these imaginings had elements of Kristin’s gentle childhood sweetheart, lost early to death; to her well-meaning but insensitive intended husband, whom she renounced because of her love for the charismatic but irresponsible knight, Erlend. My parents, as people in a novel, assumed the emotional depth of Kristin’s, and the familiar landscape of my home, my part of the city, assumed a richness seen through the eyes of story.

Reading Kristin Lavransdatter so many years later, my first reading floods back, bringing with it the girl I was, and the door it opened to the wonder of creating a fictional world that was not the trite formulaic one of True Confession magazines and their limited view of passion. Kristin’s intense and abiding passions – for love, self-assertion, her kinfolk, her children, her beliefs – were for me, and remain for me, the power that imagination and the creation of a fictional world can offer for human insight and connection.

My background: I was born into a working class family in Saskatchewan, and was raised in a small house in the west end of the city near a creek and open prairie. Although I was devoted to serious book reading from an early age, my mother’s years of illness resulting in her early death turned me even more to books as a way of being in a world larger than my own. It was shortly after her death that I began to write in every form I admired: fiction, poetry, theatre pieces, memoir, and writing is a passion that still moves me.

The edition of Sigrid Undset’s trilogy, Kristin Lavransdatter, that I read in the my high school library in the early 1960s, was the Alfred Knopf translation by Charles Archer, published in 1946, all three volumes in one hardcover of more than 1,000 pages.

However, I didn’t own my own copy until recently, the Penguin edition (2005) beautifully translated by Tina Nunnally.

Norwegian connection

"Returning from 14th-century Norway" was not an allusion to the fantastic kind of time travel performed by the incredible Dr. Who, but to the kind of "beyond time" journeying that occurs when a reader is thoroughly immersed in a spellbinding book.

Iceland was the setting for a Storyfest Journeys seminar earlier this month in Skalholt, Iceland, west of Reykjavik. The organizers of this gathering, each of them skilled and well-travelled storytellers and writers, maintain that sense of place is integral to storytelling, and to that end Iceland is the ideal setting for immersing storytellers in the richness of the Icelandic sagas and folk tales. This year, however, there was a new component: a seminar on the novel by Nobel prize winner for literature Sigrid Undset: Kristin Lavransdatter, set in 14th-century Norway, the epic tale of a medieval woman living in a time rich with myth and story. Undset's historical research for the novel was exacting but it was her reading of that greatest of Icelandic sagas, Njal's Saga, that inspired her to unfold the tale of Kristin. Although the landscape of Iceland differs considerably from the mountains and valleys of forested Norway, the physical and historical connection are strong, Iceland having begun to be settled in the 9th and 10th century by families opting to leave Norway rather than submit to the oath of loyalty to King Harald the Fairhaired.

So it was that five women gathered in Skalholt to discuss our reading of Sigrid Undset's trilogy while two other groups worked with Njal's Saga and with folk tales that had originated in different parts of Iceland. Interspersed with our conversations, writing, and telling were three day trips to different sites intimately connected with Iceland's historical sagas.

This was the setting and this the bare description of what we did there, but the power of the experience was such that I am still on this journey even after having returned home.

While recovering from jet lag, and sorting through the trove of material that came back with me (fortunately Customs does not ask what travellers carry back in their dreams and imaginations, or I'd still be at the airport telling my own saga), I wandered into what the local shopping mall offers as its version of a bookstore, and found there a book by a writer whose work I've followed off and on for years, reading what I could: Travels with Herodotus by the late Ryszard Kapuscinski. Tom Bissell, in his NY Times book review, quotes from one of the passages I had noted as especially significant for the telling of stories, referring as it does to the transmission of knowledge from one generation to another: "The knowledge takes the form of various tales. People sit around the fire and tell stories. Later, these will be called legends and myths, but in the instant when they are first being related and heard, the tellers and the listerners believe in them as the holiest of truths, absolute reality."

"People sit around the fire and tell stories." The knowledge that is transmitted is not only the dates and places of battles and "to prevent the traces of fhuman events from being erased by time", but the knowing of place and of being human, and the mingling of memory and imagination. Just as Odin kept two ravens on his shoulders, Hugin and Munin -- Thought and Memory -- for each was essential to wisdom, so we need stories to remind us, and to help us think about, what it means to be human in this eventful and strife-torn world.

Return from 14th century Norway

Making a leap from medieval Norway to 21st century Canada is not only difficult conceptually. In addition to "imagination lag" from a world rich in myth and redolent of saga, there's the physical effect of too many airports and airlines and customs declarations ("Anything to declare?" -- "I declare that I'm thoroughly fed up with standing in long lines of tired people.") not to mention the discombobulation of sleep patterns (despite the faithful ingestion of "No Jet Lag" homeopathic tablets) and the disorientation of returning to a house that looks almost as neglected after my absence as the 10th century Viking farmstead in Iceland that I visited with a group of storytellers.

Therein lies a tale -- which is that I intend this blog to spin. I already have two blogs in what might be called "cut-out limbo" as a renowned CBC radio music host once described his program which highlighted LPs no longer in circulation. Physically -- again -- typing on a keyboard is a far remove from weaving on a loom, moving the shuttle back and forth, the weft creating the story on the firmly strung warp, or even from shaping images with knitting needles or tapestry needles, magically creating a tale from seemingly thin air. Perhaps thin air is the connection, given that reality in a digital age is "virtual", as in non-corporeal, and that try as we might to see or even imagine the Emperor's dazzling new suit of clothes, he remains naked.

And yet -- at the heart of it all -- even here in 21st century Canada we live in a continuum of stories (and there springs to mind the wonderful tale written by O.R. Melling in The Book of Dreams) and through them the connection lives between the myths that came into being in places all over the globe, waiting to be rekindled in our imaginations. We need only to listen and to read, but mostly to have our ears and eyes, hearts and mind open. The revival of storytelling in so many countries is an indication that it is not only our opposable thumbs that make us unique beings, and our upright posture, but our urge to tell stories and our love of hearing them.

While clearing papers on the dining room table, I came across a page I had printed from Mythic Passages before I left because of an article there by Terri Windling, a storyteller whose work I greatly admire, having chanced upon her novel The Wood Wife a couple of years ago in the library. I have since purchased a copy, and reread it twice now, knowing that when I am in need of re-enchantment after the onslaught of what the media insists is "news", I will return to this story. Her brief but eloquent item in Mythic Passages emphasizes the connection between place and story, and the way in which she lets "the land speak through me with its own voice." Her vision of the importance of myth and story is one that I fully honour: "just as nightly dreams reflect the realities of our waking life, the symbols found in folklore and myth (the collective dreams of entire cultures) provide useful metaphors for the journeys, struggles and transformations we encounter in modern life."