But I think that’s part of why Kristin, the novel, is so compelling. I’m not sure the same can be said for the character she created: Kristin Lavransdatter. Endearingly, she also wrote a play version of the Norwegian folktale “East of the Sun and West of the Moon” and staged a puppet performance at a children’s hospital. Later, in the 1940s, the Catholic convert drew from her Nobel Prize-winnings to support refugee children and the resistance of Stalin’s invasion of Finland, and to speak out against Nazism while exiled abroad. In addition to other medieval- and modern-themed works, she created Kristin as a forty-something single mother of young children. But beginning in childhood she prowled archaeological digs with her historian father and voraciously read whatever she could find about the Middle Ages-from sagas and ballads to scholarship-and, in this way, she came to feel at home in medieval Norway. Here I offer just a glimpse of why I think the book deserves a wider readership-especially a Protestant one.ĭanish-born Sigrid Undset lacked a university education. It’s become a minor life goal to make this masterpiece more widely known. Next time, I heeded recommendations and found a copy of Tiina Nunnally’s luminous translation, and the rest was history: ten years and half a dozen readings later, I seldom stop thinking about Kristin-at least not for very long. But even after returning the first volume of the 1928 trilogy, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. To be fair, though, I hadn’t heard of it until I stumbled on an article in a Catholic blog a decade ago and then, with some disappointment, trudged through the stilted thees-and-thous translation I found in the library.

I’m always surprised how few people have heard of Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter.