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.