Kristin Lavransdatter read-along | 2025

Thanks for your post, Buttalapasta.
There's a lot to think about. I wonder if Kristin's unhappiness in marriage will be as extensive as her mother's. It seems to be the case as her health is suffering. I wonder if that was why she didn't nurse her second son.

I’d fallen behind but just caught up with book and comments. I can’t add anything to everyone’s insightful posts but have been nodding along. I agree it was interesting to see Erlend from Lavrans’ perspective, as rather a nonentity, and enjoyed him being manoeuvred away.

I just want to add to what @cassandresaid about sin, because it is an important part of the novel and there is a lot think about. I think that there are 2 ways to look at this - firstly from a historical perpective and secondly as part of the literary tradition. (I’ll caveat this by saying I’m not a historian & I don’t know much about Norwegian literature).

From a historical point of view, medieval rules about chastity were strict, and the consequences for women for flouting them could be severe - although not always. A good example is Queen Isabella of England who got away with a presumed affair (until she got into trouble politically) because her husband (Edward II) was so inept - in contrast 2 of her sisters-in-law (married to French princes) were imprisoned for adultery because Isabella’s father was a much stronger king. Men tended to escape this censure, although not always (Pierre Abelard was castrated for his affair with Héloïse) and they could be resented for this (I’m think I remember that this was one of the complaints against King John). The point about confession and absolution is a really good one - but while I would agree with expecting someone to move onwards after that, I can’t help wondering if this might be depend on what else happens in your life. Admittedly, that’s due to thinking about Henry VIII continuing to think that his first marriage was sinful because he has no sons despite what the church told him, and he probably isn’t a strong argument for anything.

One of the things I really like about this novel is that as well as looking at what the author and the characters say, you also have to bear in mind what the characters do, and it is really striking that if the main women characters in the novel, few actually live up to medieval moral standards. The only one does is Ulvhild, who is (1) very young and (2) very unwell - Kristin, Ragnfrid, Fru Aashild and Simon’s sister all fall short. Kristin’s friend at the convent would have probably liked the opportunity to sin and Simon’s mother is possibly cross that Kristin has behaved too properly towards Simon. My reading of that is that it is quite a damming critique of medieval morals - they just aren’t realistic for most people.

Some men do fare better on this, but it is striking that of the “good” men, none are celibate. Lavrans and Simon both marry, and Gunnulf pointedly doesn’t engage with the conversation when Erlend asks about his celibacy. Sigrid Undset also makes it clear that they have all paid a high price for conforming to societal standards (Lavrans and Simon would prefer to be married to someone else and Gunnulf presumably would rather not be in the Church). Again it shows that the system doesn’t work for men either - you either pay the price for conforming, or (like Erlend and Bjorn) you lose the respect of your peers.

I also think that it isn’t the sin that is such a problem for Kristin and Ragnfrid - it’s more that their behaviour has been so secretive and deceptive. Kristin herself shows that public opinion isn’t always as strict as moral standards when she thinks that people would be sympathetic if she was pregnant if her father had kept her and Erlend apart because it is romantic, but they will think it funny that she and Erlend could not wait until they were married. Simon’s sister’s situation is very sad when her fiancé dies unexpectedly, but her experience is very different to that of Kristin. Simon and his wife look after his sister while the baby is born, the baby’s father’s family adopt the baby and Simon’s sister then returns to her family. It is a very sad situation, but the impression is of family rallying around to support someone who had been very unlucky.

Ragnfrid, I think is haunted by the fact that she deceived Lavrans when they were married and she must have been under a lot of pressure as it is implied that Fru Aashild knew about this so could betray her - then this was compounded by her later betrayal and being unsure of who the father of her first child was. The deaths of her children and Ulvhild’s injury, I think really confirmed her belief that she was being punished for her behaviour. Ulvhild’s situation is particularly sad as I think there is a hint in the book that Lavrans and Ragnfrid were getting on much better after Ulvhild’s birth because Ragnfrid was much happier (and prettier). This just makes her situation sadder as she is trapped by her own guilt.

For Kristin, I think that she was betraying her commitment to Simon and deceiving her parents and the abbess - and that it is hard to sustain the image of a romantic love when her behaviour has been so squalid at times (eg meeting Erlend in a brothel). I think it is this deceit that is so hard for both Ragnfrid and Kristin to bear and this does distinguish them from Simon’s sister. I’m also wondering how Kristin’s reckoning with her own behaviour while on pilgrimage will affect her relationship with Erlend, who hasn’t had this experience (because he went hunting).

I’ll write a bit more later re my thoughts on the litarary tradition - & thanks again to @cassandrefor making me think so much about this aspect of the book.

Thank you for your interesting posts @cassandre ! Maternal impression, especially. And the biographical detail is surely not a coincidence.

I thought that Kristin would have found a sense of acceptance and resolution following her pilgrimage that ended in a vision, but clearly not. The burden of sin continues to weigh heavily on her (and on the reader!) I thought that talking with the priestly brother would have helped by now. Yes, the 'sin stuff' is hard going. And Erlend continues to be a dick. There are two more stupid comments in the chapter about Kirstin's second pregnancy. And he isn't nice to Orm either who seems like a lovely young man.

The jumps in the text are a bit startling, Buttalapasta!

Today's chapter was long but really interesting I thought. I agree with @cassandre about the obsession with sexual sin seeming a bit much - I would have thought that the marriage would have cancelled that out but apparently not! Surely the whole poison/Aline episode was worse?

It was good to hear more about Orm and his relationship with his father. I hope he is going to become a more central character.

He's just SUCH A DICK. I can't get over the fact he's disappointed in Kristin being pregnant, because he thinks people will admire them less as a newlywed couple, when he's the one who had sex with her despite her protest!
You're going to like him even less in this chapter! I think his emotions are very much always on the surface and he doesn't bother to hide what he thinks - probably because he has never had to.

Thanks for posting about maternal impression. I found that fascinating. When I was pregnant I broke my arm and I kept dreaming that my son would be born with a broken arm too. Needless to say, he wasn't!

I am enjoying all the domestic details too, especially all the different places to sleep which seem to change every night depending on who is around. It must have been a far more communal life with little privacy.

(Does anyone else sometimes find the narrative difficult to follow with the skips forward in time? Maybe I am just not very good at concentrating on long texts anymore...)

Just one last thing I promise! Reading the wiki entry on Undset, I'm struck by how some of the details of her life match Kristin's:

In Rome, Undset met Anders Castus Svarstad, a Norwegian painter, whom she married almost three years later. She was 30; Svarstad was thirteen years older, married, and had a wife and three children in Norway. It was nearly three years before Svarstad got his divorce from his first wife.

Undset and Svarstad were married in 1912 and went to stay in London for six months. From London, they returned to Rome, where their first child was born in January 1913.[A boy, he was named after his father. In the years up to 1919, she had another child, and the household also took in Svarstad's three children from his first marriage. These were difficult years: her second child, a girl, was mentally handicapped, as was one of Svarstad's sons by his first wife.

(Apologies for the dated term 'mentally handicapped' btw; someone should edit the Wiki entry.)

She and her husband ultimately divorced when she was pregnant with their third child, but I don't know whether that links up to Kristin's story (I doubt it!). All these events took place before she started writing Kristin Lavransdatter.

Anyway I know one should be careful interpreting novels as autobiographical (especially women writers, because assuming that women can only tell their own stories is a sexist assumption). But I do wonder whether Undset isn't exploring themes via Kristin that she encountered in her own life: marrying an older man who already has a partner and children, taking in the stepchildren. And then embracing God as a way of coming to terms with her past.

As a side note, I also read online that she became a big advocate for children with learning disabilities and even donated part of her Nobel Prize money to a fund for families caring for these children at home. That is impressive.

Sorry, I'm still going with the posts, I'm long-winded!

Even though the sin theme is making me grumpy, I think Undset is doing a great job of highlighting male hypocrisy and selfishness through the character of Erlend. He's just SUCH A DICK. I can't get over the fact he's disappointed in Kristin being pregnant, because he thinks people will admire them less as a newlywed couple, when he's the one who had sex with her despite her protest!

He did get a long telling-off from his priest brother. (Incidentally, the younger brother being a priest is also an authentic historical detail: primogeniture meant that only the oldest son could inherit, so younger sons had to work out what the hell to do with their lives.)

@Benvenuto I really liked your comment about how earlier Kristin was more like her mother (experiencing sensual passion), but now she's more like Lavrans. That's so true. She's wisely improving everything in Erlend's neglected household. And now that she's a mother, she's less interested in sex, much to Erlend's annoyance.

I'll leave it for now but I'm enjoying the read! I didn't understand the historical stuff very well either. Can't decide whether to go back and reread or just carry on...

One theme I find fascinating is the idea, referenced several times now, that an experience a woman has during pregnancy can affect the child in the womb, and change their physical appearance. I've read a bit about this and it's called 'maternal impression'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maternal_impression

Goethe wrote a novel about it called Elective Affinities. I kept thinking that Kristin's baby would be fine, but as it happens, he has the dramatic 'drops of blood' over his heart.

Thanks @TimeforaGandT! I've just caught up with my reading and the thread; I'd fallen behind due to feeling poorly for awhile (just a virus, but very annoying).

There are so many interesting comments and I'm so late, I won't try to namecheck people, but thank you!

That description of Kristin's labour and giving birth was excruciatingly realistic. I do think that's one of the features of the fact that the author is a woman: I felt as though she knew what she was talking about. The depictions of breastfeeding are also very convincing.

I confess that all of the 'sin' stuff is quite heavy going for me. I keep wondering how much of the ethos is consistent with medieval times and how much of it is Undset's own conservative religious mindset (she converted to Catholicism shortly after writing the saga, I think). I've read a lot of medieval literature (but no Norse medieval literature, admittedly!) and while there is certainly a high priority placed on female virginity (both in a religious sense, and in the sense of virginity being a commodity and crucial to families' reputations), Ragnfrid's bitter self-condemnation, lasting over so many years, doesn't feel very medieval to me. There are loads of premarital and extramarital sexual relations in medieval texts. No, these relations usually aren't seen as ethically unproblematic (except maybe in comic stories?), but still, it seems to me that medieval people broke the rules (or sinned) and then just got on with things! First Ragnfried, and then Kristin, are so fixated on their sexual sin. Even the whole first section of The Wife is called 'The Fruit of Sin'.

Anyway, rant over. I don't want to judge this novel just on the basis of how historically accurate it is, because it deserves to be appreciated in its own right, as the work of a woman writer in 1920s Norway. However, I suspect that the details about daily life in this novel (what @MotherOfCatBoy called the Little-House-on-the-Prairie-esque detail) are more historically accurate than the depictions of people's thoughts and feelings. But the thoughts and feelings of the past are harder to capture. We can find them in literature to a degree, but literary texts themselves are never simply a straightforward depiction of everyday life.

I did admire the chapter about Kristin's pilgrimage. They did love pilgrimages in the Middle Ages!

Excellent psychology going on on Lavrans's part. Erland is weak but works well under guidance. The thing is to find him a position as part a chain of command that he respects so that he feels important. Preferably somewhere far, far away :)

I ve just caught up. It does continuously seem that Erlend is weak and easily influenced. I was also amused by Lavrans’ suggestion which is clearly to send him off in the opposite direction to where all the big important stuff is happening but make him feel he’s had a promotion, as it were. Genius!
It was also surprising that Erlend still hasn’t twigged after all this time that Lavrans is truly respected and for good reason, not just because he seems pious. He’s really quite naive isn’t he?

I decided to let the historical stuff wash over me, it's quite complicated (although I would be interested to look into it a bit more) but for the purposes of the book it's only significant that Erlend is drawn to the opposite side to Lavrans.

It's brilliant diplomacy from Lavrans that he suggests sending Erlend off to a completely different fight against the Russians, where he can go and put his new warship through its paces and they don't risk ending up on opposite sides.

The chapters about Kristin's penance were quite uncomfortable reading, especially as Erlend was last seen going off hunting!

I was delighted to see Lavrans back for much of this week. He is clearly a stark contrast to Erlend and whilst Erlend remains out of favour chez Agualusa, he is perhaps slowly learning from Lavrans. We see how easily Erlend is influenced by people around him, even Kristin notes it, and to become more Lavrans would be a good thing by any measure.

I will admit the last chapter somewhat flew over my head, I understood the two sides, but keeping track of the sides with the names was hard. Again, I come back to Lavrans and how Erlend seems to have underestimated his influence and reach.

Even by his own standards, Erlend is particularly dreadful when his son is born. It is his third child, so he has no excuse for not putting in place things that would help Kristin.

It was also instructive seeing Erlend from Lavrans’ perspective (I did find it funny when Lavrans prays for the strength to put up with Erlend’s visit). Previously, we’ve seen Erlend mainly from Kristin’s point of view where he moves from a heroic, romantic view towards the role of a more villainous seducer - but once we see him from Lavrans’ perspective he becomes a more lightweight and trivial figure. I found it striking that Lavrans can’t dislike him - even though he is a disappointment as a son-in-law / feudal lord he just isn’t consequential enough to hate. It’s also becoming clear that Erlend is easily influenced by stronger characters (as shown by Erlend putting his estate in order during the time Lavrans is staying with him).

Thanks Buttalapasta :)

I read part of that chapter twice and am still confused! I don't think it's at all clear so I'm hoping we don't have to understand it in detail, just know that there is trouble brewing.

Exactly what Fuzzy said!

You're not going to love him this week either, Time. Kristin seems to be doing the penance for both of them!

The long trek sounded so difficult. Thanks for the information Buttalapasta about how long it was. Wearing rough clothes, without any provisions and carrying her young baby in a sling, ensuring his safety and well-being, I think she has paid her dues.

I'm not sure I completely grasped what was happening concerning the king. Is Lavrans a royalist or not? I got a bit befuddled. It was a long chapter. I might read it or someone here might explain in ten words or less.

I only started this week, and was putting it off, but I remembered I have the audio too so caught up (almost, just one more chapter).

The references to religion, penance, sin is A LOT. Back at the weekend for more thoughts once everyone has read this week.

Hello again. I have finally caught up with you again after a month off! I thought the labour scene was harrowing and very true to life - perhaps because I gave birth without pain relief too, I really felt her exhaustion. The walk to Nidaros (barefoot?) was fascinating. I looked it up on Google maps (and presuming I got the right starting point) it would take about eight hours on foot. No wander she was tired.