Olav Audunsson: Crossroads by Sigrid Undset

Now, in a state of calm reflection, Olav listened to the only voice that spoke to him in a language he understood. Here, in this foreign land, all other voices shouted at him as if there were a wall between them and him. Yet the voice of the church was the same one he had listened to as a child and a youth and a grown man. He himself had changed in terms of goals and thought and speech as he moved through the stages of life, but the church had changed neither voice nor meaning. It spoke to him in the holy mass just as it had spoken to him as a little boy, when he understood very few of the words yet still understood much by observing--the way a child understands his mother by watching her expressions and gestures before he understands the spoken words. And Olav knew that if he traveled to the farthermost regions where Christian men lived, their language and customs and appearance might seem strange and incomprehensible to him. But wherever he happened upon a church and went inside, he would be embraced by the same voice that had spoken to him when he was a child.

When we last left Olav Audunsson, his wife Ingunn had just died after a long illness. Ingunn's death resolves what might have seemed like the central tension of Undset's tetralogy, the love between the man and woman that thrived in spite of all the machinations of their families to drive them apart. I admit I was surprised, but I had to remind myself that, as one learns in Kristin Lavransdatter, Undset is no believer in the primacy of romantic love when there is a higher love, and a higher law. But Ingunn's death leaves Olav in a strange place, having taken in Ingunn's love-child Eirik and raised him as his own, while his own bastard, a son named Bjorn with a woman named Torhild, is at a neighboring estate. It's Eirik that will inherit the manor Hestviken, despite Olav's dislike of him (and he is quite annoying, apart from being the son of another man), while Bjorn exists for Olav only as a reminder of lost possibilities.

The first part of Crossroads is taken up by a trip to London, where Olav does some merchant business. Olav, lonely and adrift, nearly enters into an adulterous relationship with the wife of a blind man, but runs away at the last minute, repelled by her strangeness and foreignness. The blind man's wife speaks in a language Olav can't understand, but during his trip he rekindles his love for the church, which, as described in the passage above, speaks in a universal language that can be understood no matter where Olav is. Olav decides, with only some misgivings, that he will never remarry, and devote the remainder of his life to the memory of Ingunn and to the church.

The novel's subtitle suggests that it captures Olav at a "crossroads," and the novel feels like a crossroads, too, a necessary transition between points of stronger dramatic tension. The conflict that's established between Olav and Eirik only festers. Though the two find a way to become somewhat closer, Eirik's anxiety that somehow his inheritance will be stolen from him--deep down, perhaps, he understands something that he cannot articulate about why his father is so alienated from him--make him especially anxious and unreliable. Ultimately, Eirik flees from the conflict, entering into a knight's service, and the last time we see him, he has grown at last into a man. Olav is left with his manor and his daughters, but more or less alone.

The novel ends with something I'd never seen from Undset before: an honest-to-god battle. When Olav hears that Norway has been invaded by a Swedish duke, he and his fellow knights are called into battle to repel the party of the invaders. In the melee, Olav is badly wounded and left facially disfigured. (Perhaps sealing the deal on that promise to never remarry.) This, it felt to me, was the point to which Crossroads has been leading our hero: ravaged, abandoned, and yet with a renewed sense of his own obligations to God and country, which perhaps will steel him in whatever crisis of inheritance and fatherhood is coming in the series' final installment--coming, for this reader, next December.

Olav Audunsson: Providence by Sigrid Undset

But he couldn't escape from the childhood memories that arose--including the once secure knowledge that he and Ingunn belonged to each other and would always stay together. The very notion that something might come between them had never entered their minds, and for that reason being together had never stirred their hearts either to joy or astonishment. They had simply taken it for granted. That was how it would always be, precisely as it had been decided for them. Until the summer, that is, when, wrapped in each other's arms, they had tumbled out of their childhood and innocent state, frightened yet also giddy with joy at the new sweetness they had discovered in each other--regardless of whether it was right or wrong for them to surrender it. Even after Olav had roused himself to defy and fear everything and everyone who tried to intervene in their fate, he had been convinced that in the end they would win their case. Such memories would suddenly come upon Olav, and the pain burned like the stab of a knife.

Vows, the first book in Sigrid Undset's tetralogy about the live of Olav Audunsson, ends with Olav killing Teit, the Icelander who impregnated his wife Ingunn, and burning down the shack in which his body lay. I wrote that Olav had left his ornate ancestral axe within the shack, thinking that this would turn out to be the clue that led to Olav's downfall--but this turned out to be incorrect, as a kind reader pointed out: it was just an ordinary axe that Olav left. And I should have known better. This being Undset, author of the Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy, I should have understood that Olav's sin would not be revealed by simple detective work, that it would gnaw at Olav's heart until he was forced to reveal it himself.

In Providence, the second book in the series, Olav finds himself trapped by this secret. He vows to expiate his guilt by bringing Eirik, the child of Ingunn and Teit, back to his manor of Hestviken and pretend that he is his biological son. This presents several problems: for one, Eirik is really annoying. He turns out to be a very fanciful and imaginative child--we are reminded of the playful, reckless Teit--who has trouble distinguishing the real from fantasy. And he talks too much. Secondly, by raising Eirik to the heir of Hestviken, he has disinherited any legitimate son he might have with Ingunn. This is, perhaps, why Ingunn goes through several miscarriages; the one time she manages to birth a son, he withers and dies quickly. Ingunn withers, too; over the course of the novel she is struck by a terrible sickness that seems to emerge from her guilt and the frailty of her soul. It takes from her her sons, and then it takes her ability to walk. Olav keeps the secret for her sake, and yet keeping the secret gives the pair no happiness or joy.

Olav Audunsson, or the first two novels at least, is a much bleaker series than even Kristin Lavransdatter, which is also about living through the consequences of the choices of one's youth. Kristin is rewarded for her unfaithfulness to her father and her fiancee with a marriage to the romantic Erlend, and though it causes her much pain, and they even separate for a time, they are both rewarded with a kind of fiery love that is shared between them. When one reads about the chilly relationship between Olav and Ingunn, how they cling to one another out of duty and obligation but without joy or affection, one wonders, what was it all worth? When--spoiler alert--Ingunn dies at the novel's conclusion, we are left with the bitter sense that all the wreckage and faithlessness of their lives has had very little in the way of recompense.

Like Kristin Lavransdatter, Olav Audunsson is in some respect an apology for the Catholic model of confession and repentance. Olav knows that he would be doing his duty to God by confessing his sins and taking the appropriate consequences, but the possibility of cleansing is closed off to him. And for good reasons--his obligations toward Ingunn and toward Eirik, who is innocent of his own making--but these are worldly reasons, and not God's, and like Kristin, Olav suffers because he is too frail to trust in God's ideas of what constitute one's highest obligations. At the end of Part II, Olav finds himself without a wife and someone else's son. In a moment of weakness, he impregnates Torhild, the steadfast handmaiden of the household, and though he provides for her and her--his--son, it's not too hard to see that the next two parts of the tetralogy may set up a conflict between these two sons, innocent both of their circumstances, and yet neither of whom quite "deserves" to become the inheritor of Olav's estate. I'm looking forward to reading those, but it'll be next December, when another cold and chilly season rolls around--perfect for Undset's Norway, but also for the the themes of suffering and contrition that are at the heart of these incredible books.

Olav Audunsson: Vows by Sigrid Undset

The unfathomable suffering and agony in her poor eyes--that was what drew his own naked soul up into the light. Gone was everything he had thought and intended and decided. He sensed that great and weighty things had now all but vanished from his mind; he was incapable of holding on to them. What remained was only the latest and deepest cruel certainty that she was the flesh of his flesh and life of his life, and no matter how mistreated and despoiled and broken she might be, it could never be otherwise. Their life's roots had been entwined from the first moment he could remember. And now he saw how death had seized hold of her with both hands, he felt as if he too had barely managed to escape from being torn apart. Then a longing came over him so forcefully that it shook him to his very core--a longing to pull her desperately close, to hide both her and himself.

For many years I have had a December tradition of reading one of Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter novels. First, in the older, more archaic Charles Archer translation; then in Tiina Nunally's (superior) modern translation. This year, it felt like time to move on, not from the tradition, but to one of Undset's other books of medieval Norway. (I also read it at the end of November, not December, but it's pretty cold outside, and besides, I'm stuck at home with COVID and really needed something to seek my teeth into.) Vows, titled in other translations as The Axe, is the first of a series named either for its male protagonist Olav Audunsson, or for his title, The Master of Hestviken, and it follows Olav as he pursues the fulfillment of the promise of marriage his father made with that of his beloved, Ingun Steinfinnsdatter.

In many ways, Olav and Ingunn are like the anti-Kristin and anti-Erland. Whereas Kristin seeks to be released from her engagement to good-hearted Simon Darre so that she may marry the impetuous older man, Olav and Ingunn want nothing more than to fulfill the agreement their parents made: on his deathbed, Olav's father entrusted his son to Steinfinn, who would raise him as a son until he came of age, and then marry Ingunn. But plans change: Steinfinn and his wife Ingeborg are transformed by a cruel attack by Ingeborg's former betrothed, which leaves them both vengeful and withdrawn. Steinfinn has his vengeance, but receives a mortal wound in the process, and after his death, Ingunn's uncles are not so keen to fulfill a promise they know nothing about, and want to marry Ingunn to someone who will provide them a strong alliance. Olav and Ingunn force the uncles' hand by sleeping together, thus binding the marriage in the eyes of the local bishop, but theirs is a Norway in a state of constant change, and the power of the bishops is no guarantee. Olav only make things worse when he kills one of Ingunn's brothers in a fit of anger, and becomes an outlaw.

The story of Vows is one of patience and toil: Olav and Ingunn strive and wait for nearly a decade for their rights to be recognized, and for them to be permitted to live together at Olav's ancestral house at Hestviken. It must be said that neither character has the charisma of Kristin, with her preternatural loveliness and purity, or of outrageous Erland. Olav is sullen and sort of humorless, and Ingunn's principle character trait is her psychological fragility: after being separated from Olav, she becomes briefly psychosomatically paralyzed. But there's no doubt that they fit together, as they believe. Olav's single-minded insistence on claiming what's his by right, Ingunn's deep need for Olav's protection, these drive them together as much as any vow or legal status, and the social, political, and personal factors that drive them apart seem all the more horrible and cruel.

Like Kristin Lavransdatter, Vows only works to the extent that you are really willing to believe in the validity of Olav and Ingunn's marriage, which is cemented only by a promise and--forgive me--a penetration. Over and over again, people in the couple's lives try to convince them to settle for a different marriage, or an agreement to go their separate ways. In practice, this would actually be quite easy, it seems, but you have to believe, as Olav and Ingunn believe, that their marriage is something that exists between them and God, and that it cannot be abolished or supplanted. Undset's novel is clearly on the side of the Church in its skirmishes with powerful landholders like Ingunn's uncles, who resent the imposition of its laws over their feudal ones. And you must believe what a horrible violation it is when--spoiler alert--Ingunn allows herself to be seduced by a happy-go-lucky Icelander in Olav's long absence.

Olav and Ingunn battle heroically against the forces that would have them break their vow. But it is possible, perhaps, to go too far even in protecting one's marriage vows. Olav's killing of Ingunn's brother Einar, for which he ultimately is able to pay the acceptable murder-price, is one such moment. But another comes at the novel's climax, when Olav is approached by the Icelander, hoping that he will release his claim on Ingunn. Olav agrees to ski with the Icelander to the far estate of Olav's friend Arnvid, on the pretense of asking for his support. Then, in a woodland hut--and again, spoiler alert--he bashes the Icelander's head in with an axe. In the novel's final scene, Olav burns the hut down with the Icelander's body inside, realizing that he's left his treasured--and well-known--axe inside, and we are left to wonder if Olav hasn't finally committed a violation of God's law that is too cold, too cruel to come back from, one that will sunder him from Ingunn forever.