Review: The Wife by Sigrid Undset (translated by Tiina Nunnally)

The second part of Sigrid Undset’s Nobel Prize-winning Kristin Lavransdatter picks up where the previous installment left off. Nineteen-year-old Kristin has just married the man of her dreams, Erlend Nikulausson, and is returning to his estate to start her life as a wife. Recall that Kristin’s marriage was overshadowed by scandal; in the first novel, The Wreath, she rejected the wishes of her family and broke off betrothal with their preferred candidate Simon Andressson. She had sex with the married Erlend while they were courting (in an establishment of ill repute no less!), leading to her being pregnant on her wedding night. Erlend’s ex-wife killed herself. In a final twist of the knife, on the night of Kristin’s wedding, her mother Ragnfrid admitted to her husband Lavrans that he was also not her preferred husband.

The Wreath portrayed Kristin as a girl and young woman whose desires and impetuousness were in conflict with rules and traditions. The Wife continues that conflict, as Kristin becomes a mother, learns how to run an estate, and how to serve her husband. She battles throughout with the shameful origins of her marriage. Meanwhile Erlend gets involved in the royal politics of 14th Century Norway, her parents are ageing, and her former betrothed Simon moves on with his life, or does he? The Wreath combines biting marital drama punctuated with politics and action. It is by turns exciting, poignant and an utterly convincing evocation of time and place, but where Undset really sings is in her attention to the unpredictable inner weather of her characters and the relationships between them.

Kristin Lavransdatter lives in the tension between freedom and obligation. Kristin and Erlend are rebels by nature, they seem to represent the idea that law and tradition suppress freedom, while Lavrans represents adherence to the rules but also the inequality that can lead to. Kristin is told she has “a worldly disposition” (not a compliment), a “disagreement between body and soul”. At times she considers that “this heathen and burning love [that she feels for Erlend] was not so terrible a sin”:

She had felt her passion temper her will until it was sharp and hard like a knife, ready to cut through all bonds — those of kinship, Christianity and honour.

At other time she sees in it the source of all their problems. Undset’s novels are ambivalent about which is correct, which grants them their aliveness and possibility, although she is careful to show how “the honour of women” both structures Kristin’s society and limits the women themselves. “You’re supposed be my lord,” Kristin tells Erlend when her berates her for the way she talks to him without holding back, “I’m supposed to obey and honour you, bow to you and lean on you, next to God, in accordance with God’s laws.” But, she continues in a withering attack that illuminates the contradictions of feudal Norway (and beyond), “many times you’ve made it difficult for me to surrender my ignorance to your better understanding, to honour and obey my husband and lord as much as I would have liked .. I will not offend you again with my words, and from this day forward, I will never forget to speak to you as gently as if you were descended from thralls [serfs in Scandinavian feudalism].”

People and places are hard to keep track of (shires, estates and other terms of governance are used interchangeably); particularly the complicated system of kinship among the Norwegian nobles, but mostly this doesn’t distract from the novels’ primary narrative. There’s an archaeological quality to the world that Undset creates (fitting as the daughter of an archaeologist), even as it is lived in. On walking into a church Kristin:

walked as if through a forest. The pillars were furrowed like ancient trees, and into the woods the light seeped, colourful and as clear as song, through the stained-glass windows. High overhead animals and people frolicked in the stone foliage, and angels played their instruments.

Later on contemplating her dead she considers that:

Now they lay under a stone, falling apart like buildings that collapse have moved away … Now that they had departed for that other land, it was painful to think about their figures; it was like remembering your home when you knew it was standing there deserted, with the rotting beams sinking into the earth.

These novels capture the vagaries of life and the passage of time.

Gay rating: 1/5 for the scandalous rumoured queerness of young King Magnus.