Kristin Lavransdatter and the Purpose of Historical Fiction

Over the last month I've been participating in an online group that's reading Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrud Undset, a massive historical novel (actually a trilogy of novels, but it reads to me more as one) set in 14th century Norway. Unset wrote Kristin in the early 1920, and was received into the Catholic Church shortly afterwards in 1924, something that shows in the knowledge and realism with which religious matters are discussed in the book. However, it wasn't a niche-only success at the time. Indeed, Undset won the Novel Price for Literature in 1928. In more recent years, Undset's fame has perhaps waned a bit, but it's arguably on the upswing now, as suggested by this piece in Slate from last year about Kristin Lavransdatter.

In recent years, however, there have been signs that Kristin Lavransdatter is beginning to build up an international following to rival her domestic one. Her rescue from literary obscurity started in 1997, with the release of the first volume of Tiina Nunnally’s new translation into English from the Norwegian. Nunnally’s elegant interpretation strips the text of the leaden medieval-isms (“methought,” “belike”) favored by the previous English version. These days, Undset encomia are a staple on Catholic-interest websites, and certain corners of literary Twitter flog the series relentlessly. In 2015, William T. Vollmann told the New York Times that Kristin was his favorite fictional character, noting correctly that the trilogy “bears many rereadings.”

Kristin Lavransdatter’s three volumes total more than 1,000 pages, which follow the daughter of a wealthy farmer from age 7 through her dramatic death. (I won’t spoil major plot twists here, but if you’re worried, stop reading this and just go buy the books already.) In The Wreath, Kristin meets the great love of her life, who is not the man her parents chose for her. (The also-ran isn’t an awful guy; she could tolerate him “especially when he was talking to the others and did not touch her or speak to her.”) In the second book, The Wife, she gives birth to many sons and deals with the fallout of her husband’s rash meddling in royal politics. And in the final volume, The Cross, Kristin watches her sons grow up and, oh, by the way, reckons with the future of her immortal soul.
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If HBO is looking for its next miniseries, it should give Kristin Lavransdatter the proper adaptation it deserves. (A Scandinavian film version directed by Liv Ullmann in 1995 was plagued with production problems and received middling reviews.) Rereading the trilogy this fall, I kept thinking of Olive Kitteridge, another powerful novel about a prickly mother turned into a worthy HBO miniseries. This trilogy includes illicit sex, affairs, a church fire, an attempted rape, ocean voyages, rebellious virgins cooped up in a convent, predatory priests, an attempted human sacrifice, floods, fights, murders, violent suicide, a gay king, drunken revelry, the Bubonic Plague, deathbed confessions, and sex that makes its heroine ache “with astonishment—that this was the iniquity that all the songs were about.” And yet all the outward drama is deployed in service of a story about an ordinary woman’s quietly shifting interior life. Another tempting comparison is Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, whose huge commercial success suggests there is a market for series in translation about fierce, complicated women navigating their culturally conservative European milieu.

To sell the Kristin Lavransdatter novels as “hot” in terms of either content or buzziness somewhat misses the point, though. “Listing the strengths of Kristin Lavransdatter will not make the novel fashionable,” the scholar Otto Reinert wrote in 1999. “It is unexciting labor to claim merit for the conventional.” He was referring to both the books’ style and their moral tenor. It would be criminally simplistic to describe the series as “conservative,” but there’s a reason it appeals so powerfully to a certain kind of bookish Christian reader. As flawed as Kristin is—she is proud, lustful, brooding, and fails to live up to her own moral standards—she is a devout believer, and the books are intimately concerned with her relationship with God. Undset was a Catholic convert, and one of the most remarkable things about the trilogy is that it’s a rare literary depiction of religious people that is both empathetic and unsentimental.

It definitely seems to me that Undset deserves to be remembered and read as one of the better writers of historical fiction out there. Her portrayal of medieval Norway is seamless and utterly convincing. Not only do you find yourself believing that this is how people lived and thought and acted in a time and place very alien from our own, but she does such a good job of putting us into that world that we understand within the context of the novel why these people acted and thought the way that they did, even while realizing how alien their world was in some ways.

This got me thinking a bit about what the purpose of historical fiction is. Why should we come to understand how people lived and felt and made moral choices in a world far away in time and place.

One reason is simple curiosity. Fiction can be a powerful and involving way to help us understand what people experienced in other times. In this way, a novel may actually serve as a better introduction to understanding some era or event than reading a history book about it. Years ago, a friend whom I had asked for a recommendation on a book about the Spanish Civil War recommended Jose Maria Gironella's massive historical novel The Cypresses Believe In God rather than a history book, and it is indeed a great way to understand the divisions and suffering in pre-war Spanish society and how they spiraled into actual war. On a smaller canvas, Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels is probably the most accessible way to get a grasp of the Battle of Gettysburg, because of rather than in spite of the fact that it's a novel rather than a history book.

However, I think there's also a human and moral reason for reading historical fiction which goes beyond curiosity about other times. We are often very deeply embedded within cultural and moral assumptions of our times. These become unthought-of-axioms for us, underlying our thinking without being much examined. One way in which we can be drawn to look at and question our beliefs is to see the universal human experiences and situations we face through the different lens of another time and culture. With what's familiar stripped away, we're forced to think more deeply about what is actually a virtuous or wrong way to behave. And once we've been forced to think that through about another culture, understanding how human interactions and moral choices play out in that world, we can look back at our own world through eyes which are now partially those of a stranger, a person from another place or time, and see things more for what they are rather than what we assume them to be.