She had not come to God with her wreath or with her sins and sorrows, not as long as the world still possessed a drop of sweetness to add to her goblet. But now she had come, after she had learned that the world is like an alehouse: The person who has no more to spend is thrown outside the door.
Kristin Lavransdatter should only be read at Christmastime, perhaps before a fireplace in an oak-trimmed room, with a fragrant wreath on the door and a steady snowfall at the window. It's been nothing but hideous rain here in New York for the past few days. But that's all right, I guess; The Cross, the third and final novel of Sigrid Undset's series about the life of the medieval Norse noblewoman, is all about disappointed expectations. It begins with Kristin and her husband Erlend having come down in the world as a result of Erlend's attempt to overthrow the king; he has been saved from execution but stripped of most of his lands. At their remaining estate, Kristin and Erlend are little-loved by their tenants and neighbors. There is hope in their seven sons--perhaps they will re-win the position Erlend has lost--but you know what God does when you make plans.
Beware, weary traveler: past this point are spoilers. What I know realize, having read The Cross twice--once in the original English translation, which enters the public domain later this year, and then in Tiina Nunnally's much improved one--is that the novel is structured around three principal deaths, each one swifter and more anticlimactic than the last: Simon's, then Erlend's, the Kristin's. Simon's, perhaps, has the most drama to it. When his wound becomes infected and he knows he is going to die, Simon plans to tell Kristin the truth, that he has always loved her, even after she broke their engagement, and after he married her sister Ramborg. But as he sits on his deathbed being tended by her, he finds he is unable to say the thing he thought he wanted to say, instead urging her to reconcile with Erlend, who has moved out of the house after a quarrel. Even before this, Simon has been the books' most selfless and upright character; and his final words to Kristin are an act of self-abnegation that surprise even himself.
Simon dies before he can think better of his silence; Erlend dies so quickly he's unable to hear confession. In a way, he dies for Kristin: after he hears that Kristin has been slandered by those who believe she has had an affair with their overseer Ulf, he returns to the estate and immediately picks a fight, in which he's mortally wounded. It seems at first like Undset has engineered a pretext for a final reconciliation, but no such luck. The speed with which Erlend, whose charisma and recklessness are the novels' catalyst, is carried off is almost shocking. When he's gone, both Kristin and the novel feel adrift. Slowly, Kristin's place at her estate is supplanted by her son Gaute and his new wife; the life she led, which had burnt so hot, fades strangely away.
What I find so interesting about Kristin's death is this: much is made in these novels about family. Kristin's original sin, for which she struggles her entire life to atone, is the betrayal of her father by breaking her engagement and sneaking off with Erlend. Simon urges her to be a more faithful wife, and she tries mightily to be a faithful mother to her sons. When she's displaced from her estate, she leaves to become a nun in the sister cloister to the monastery where her sons Naakve and Bjorgulf have become priests. But on the way she finds herself caring for a child that belongs to a pair of other pilgrims; when she contracts the Black Death it's not because she's caring for her sons, but because she is caring for strangers. Her last acts are to save an annoying little boy (who is about to be sacrificed to pagan gods to ward off the plague) and to bury the pestilential body of his mother. And the death is so quick--there's no final word like Simon's, or even Erlend's.
So what struck me this time is the subtle way that The Cross supplants the notion of family, which has been so crucial to the novels, with a different, broader understanding of family. A family that encompasses the beggar and the stranger. When Kristin hears, prior to her own death, that her monk sons have been carried off by the plague, she barely has time to grieve before she is back to her work as a carer. Kristin Lavransdatter is a deeply Christian book, and makes little sense if a reader's not willing to take its religion seriously. And here at the end perhaps you see echoes of the Christ who urged his followers to hate their mother and father.
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