The Wreath by Sigrid Undset

Kristin felt that she was kneeling with Erlend on a cold stone. He knelt with the red, singed patches on his pale face. She knelt beneath the heavy bridal crown and felt the crushing, oppressive weight in her womb--the burden of the sin she was carrying. She had played and romped with her sin, measuring it out as if in a child's game. Holy Virgin--son it would be time for it to lie fully formed before her, looking at her with living eyes, revealing to her the brands of her sin, the hideous deformity of sin, striking hatefully with misshapen hands and his mother's breast. After she had borne her child, after she had seen the marks of in on him and loved him the way she had loved her sin, then the game would be played to the end.

For the last three years, I have had a December tradition of reading one of the books in Sigrid Undset's series about medieval Norway, Kristin Lavransdatter. Though the books span several years and thus, several seasons, there's something especially wintry in them; they match the cold weather and the cozy hearth. I thought this year I would begin reading Tiina Nunnally's newer translation, only to discover that I actually had read Nunnally's version of The Wreath, and the other two books in Charles Archer's older translation. Still, going from Archer's to Nunnally's emphasized the benefit of Nunnally's clear and modernizing language when compared to Archer's attempt at using medieval English vernacular. Kristin's desire to marry for love, rather than expectation or honor, is wholly recognizable, even when her social context seems foreign or strange, and Nunnally's translation produces an intimacy with the reader that Kristin and these novels deeply deserve.

Reading The Wreath again, I was struck by how well Undset anticipates The Cross, the final novel in the series. (Brent, you may want to skip this paragraph.) Kristin and her forbidden love, Erlend Nikulausson, meet while she is spending a year at the Nonneseter convent, which is something apparently that young women did before they became adults. If she cannot have Erlend, Kristin insists that she--having already given her virginity to him and thus being effectively married in the eyes of God--will go into the convent for good. This doesn't come to pass, but Kristin does end up in the convent in the end, after her husband has died and her children left home, giving her life at last to the service of God when it is most needed, during the Black Plague. Even Brother Edvin, Kristin's beloved priest and mentor, suggests that he dreamed she would choose the convent life. The scenes at Nonneseter in The Wreath, the second time through, are riddled with this irony, and they make me feel as if Kristin ends up in the right place in the end, after a long detour on which she is set by her "original sin." In a thousand other small ways--like the brief attention paid by Kristin's jilted fiancé Simon Andresson to her little sister Ramborg, who he will marry after being widowed in The Wife--I was impressed by how Undset seems to have the entire trilogy already fully mentally formed.

I know it's gauche to look at everything through the lens of television, but The Wreath had me wondering what an HBO-style Kristin Lavransdatter series would look like. I'm imagining a season for each novel where, like with The Crown, the main characters are recast as they age. The Wreath is punctuated by moments of sheer drama that would play well on the screen: the attempted rape by Bentein and the murder of Kristin's friend Arne (ingeniously set up by Undset as the "forbidden love" Erlend later becomes), the moment Erlend meets Kristin by saving her from a pack of thieves (and a escaped leopard!), the standoff over a cup of poison between Kristin and Erlend's former mistress Eline, the accident that cripples Kristin's sister Ulvhild, the church fire that brings Erlend and Kristin's father Lavrans inches closer to reconciliation.

The challenge, of course, would be convincing a modern audience that the morality of these novels deserves to be taken seriously. I don't think that sex before marriage is a big deal, but the Norway of Kristin Lavransdatter does, and for good reasons: marriage in this society, as in many, is not merely an act of personal love but a way of binding families and communities, and a sacrament jealously guarded by God. Only a skilled director and actors, I think, could sufficiently remind us, as Undset does, that marriage has meant something different to other cultures than ours. If you could get over that hurdle, Kristin Lavransdatter is riddled with moments of excruciating pathos. As when I first read it three years ago, I was deeply moved by the tense moment between Lavrans and his wife Ragnfrid at the end where she admits that she was not a virgin at their wedding, a moment which recontextualizes the entire novel that has come before it. And knowing that marriage is not the end for Erlend and Kristin--that the future holds further, deeper challenges--makes The Wreath even more heart-jerking.