The descriptions in this book are awesome. They draw the reader into medieval Norway and its life and society. Set in an age where Christianity and superstitious ways mingled; giving an interesting mix of how society may have adapted from one form of belief to another. This changing world is one of the things that draws me to the King Arthur legend so I expected to enjoy that aspect of this book.

However, in the story department, this book falls somewhat flat. Characters aren’t fully developed; they act in ways that don’t seem right for the character we know and events that unfold seem almost too convenient. It’s as if Undset wrote to the story, changing her characters to fit how she wants the story to unfold; she didn't develop her characters and have the story build around them.

This book is about Kristin's inadequacies and guilt before God and her family and her feelings of inadequacy as a Christian. She never gets over her guilt and cannot enjoy the life she has because of this heavy, burdensome guilt. Being that this book centers so much on Christianity and God's goodness & forgiveness, it seems that Kristin's inability to enjoy the good life given her and her continual wallowing in her guilt & blaming of others for her sins is rather like a rejection of the gift of Life that God gave her. She just couldn't relax, enjoy and cherish the Life she had.

Well, well, well, Miss Undset has made it onto my 10-star list. She should be proud. She also won a Nobel Prize for her work, so there is that. Her Kristin Lavransdatter books are unquestionably works of massive scope on par with JRR Tolkien's Lord Of the Rings. A strange comparison, you say? Well I agree with you. The only thing that comes to mind immediately is the length of the two. But there is so much more. Where LOTR was preparation for battle with Sauron's forces, Kristin Lavransdatter was an intimate look into a Norwegian community. It's the attention to detail that struck me as similar. Tolkien and Undset both took such great care to imbue their work with eternal life. They captured that elusive something that can't be described, or rather could be described in many different ways. Undset obviously did massive research into 14th Century Norwegian customs before she put pen to paper. The community is not, like in so many other books, a static thing that serves as a canvas for the main character to travel across without resistance. In this sense the book displays Newtons Third Law. Each action Kristin makes is met with an equal and opposite reaction from her community. Such is reality. Sadly...

The great wisdom this book imparted on me is what made it unforgettable. It's so layered that it portrays almost all aspects of a woman's life during the 14th century.(I specify the era because many things have changed since then but I wish to stress that I noticed that the similarities between the times are more prominent than the differences) Talk about a woman's perspective! Every budding teenage boy wanting to understand the complexities of a woman's mind should read this. Never before did I realize how different men and women really are.

And the layers! How layered life actually is. Everything is like a circle within a circle within a circle with the inner most circle eventually becoming our intimate other. The second and third book are like a survival guide for the married couple. Erlend and Kristin are not always perfectly faithful - there are minor(well, you could call them major) mishaps between the two - but they never truly stop loving each other. They never stop caring for each other and their children, like most normal parents do. Now I can appreciate how remarkable my mom and pops really are, how truly magnificent women can be, and what it means to bring a life into this world. In fact, there is nothing that I didn't not not like about this book(double negatives included). There is magic, most who know me will attest to my love of all things magical. The prose are humble yet beautiful in there delivery. All in all the book was masterful. It taught me to appreciate life, not just my life but also the lives that are close to mine, more. And to quote Kurt Vonnegut 'If that isn't nice, I don't know what is.'

An epic novel of a women's life in 14th century Norway.

Viața unei femei - copilăria, adolescența, dragostea, maternitatea, copiii, maturitatea, pierderea identității și bătrânețea.

I wrote the review and lost it so won't rewrite it. I read this in the late 70's when it was popular. I liked the second "reading" via an audiobook over 44 hours long. It kept my attention although I liked it more when I first read it. Back then it was unique, less so now.
Worthwhile for readers interested in Norwegian history, and women's stories. Kristin Lavransdatter is a fictional character, but there are plenty of details about 14th century Norwegian life.

This book quiets me. After finishing it I find myself looking forward with joyous acceptance of what might lie ahead, and backwards with earnest awareness of the goodness of each and every moment of my life so far. All of time and space is contained within the boundless goodness of my Father, and I may rest.

Audio #145

Superb! Loved this
Top marks story telling

n  But she couldn’t help it; it was her nature to love with great toil and care.n

When I read, I seek the marrow of things. Details and description of lands I shall never see and times I shall never know are all very well, but I am a human being, and it is human beings I am concerned with. It is easier for me with some books than others due to commonalities of sex and race and culture, but more often than not that is a surface tension appeal, a reliance on shared references that both author and I indulge in. What matters is when the author dives deep into both thought and feeling, wrestling in such a knowledgeable yet empathetic way that it matters not that they were born in the 19th century and I was not, that they were religious and I am not, that they were holistically passionate about Norway in the Middle Ages and I am not. The fact that we share a gender helps, but considering how this work won the author a Nobel Prize for Literature and how beloved it is today, I'd say it's more than that.

n  But the most extreme and oppressive fears seized her whenever she thought of Simon—the way he had picked her up and carried her off and spoken for her at home and acted as if she were his property. Her father and mother had yielded to him as if she already belonged more to him than to them.

God only knew she didn’t consider herself more than a simple woman; she would have preferred to avoid taking responsibility for anything but her own children and her household duties. And yet she had been forced to deal with so many things that seemed to her more appropriate concerns for a man to handle. But Erlend had thought it quite reasonable to let them rest on her shoulders. So it didn’t suit him to act so overbearing and to rebuff her when she wanted to know about things that he had undertaken on his own that would affect the welfare of them all.n

The woman who takes a path different from what has been ordained is a popular topic in the classics, but it is a rare piece of literature that so thoroughly and humanely follows that "fallen" life to its end. Rare is the work that brings forth a woman who, while willing and able to follow the mores of the world she has been brought up in, does not accept the assumption that she will submit to them entirely. Sewing, yes, marriage, yes, but also the consideration of her self as a subject with her own aesthetics and moral grounds, her own lusts and commitment to others. Her faith is one which critically evaluates the differences between what she has been taught and how she has been treated, and were she a man she would have had a vaster field upon which to experiment, possess, take responsibility for what she has done and not for what has been done to her. However, she is a woman, and that is an epic all in itself.

n  “And yet you cannot proceed with a change in the law before it has been enacted without exerting excessive force against the people—and from ancient times the people have had difficulty in accepting excessive force from their kings.”

How in fiery Hell was a man to rule his wife if he couldn’t beat her because of her high birth and his own sense of honor.n

The person who recommended this to me called it a Norwegian Middlemarch, and now that I have finished, I say it is a true statement for all intents and purposes. There are, however, some sizable differences, ones that I myself enjoyed but may not be as favorable to others. Where Middlemarch spreads across a web of plots comparable in length, this work is most concerned with its titular character, dipping masterfully into the heads of surrounding others when needed but only just, embellishing the sociopolitical concerns in a fully realized world of an intellectually restricted woman. Where Middlemarch dwells on several years of serious social turnovers, its sleepy Victorianisms are melodramatic hyperspeed in comparison to the Middle Ages of honor and pagans and the Black Plague. Where Middlemarch plucks and bends but more often than not turns towards the realistic happy ending, Kristin Lavransdatter triggers the fall, follows them down, and watches these human beings wrest their own measure of self-worth from a narrative that in any other work would have ended with the finality of death. Middlemarch has both depth and breadth, but it does not send its heroine through the ravages of death and time and all the social redemption they bring long after they would have done any good. It does not send its heroine into a gorgeous world of unjust human beings and wrestle it with her to the very end.

n  “Ah, young child, you probably think there's nothing else that entices in the world save sensual pleasure and wealth and power. I must tell you that these are small things that are found along the side of the road—but I, I have loved the roads themselves.”

Now she realized that her mother’s heart had been deeply etched with memories of her daughter, memories of her thoughts about the child from before she was born and from all the years the child could not remember, memories of fears and hopes and dreams that children would never know had been dreamed on their behalf, before it was their own turn to fear and hope and dream in secret.n

There is a beauty from refusing to cut off a story at the "happily ever after" point, for none of us have the benefit of that. There is a beauty in forgoing the finality of a tragic death and setting the character forth to persist on their own terms, seeming flaws and shamefulness paling beside the very fact that they are still alive. While it is advisable that the reader seek out the latest translation of this and all its accompanying end notes, there is a story here that will ring true with any who have struggled with law and with other, even more so with those have wrestled in the dead of the night with their regretful past and unknown future. I will not claim that everyone will empathize with the lengthy bouts between one person and Christianity in the Middle Ages, but I can say with certainty that this is not a story that aims to convert. It is a story of a human being in a part of the world during a time of great religious focus, and never is the strength of any individual in the face of death and growth and transitioning faith taken for granted.

n  But the drifting blue shadows on the hillsides, the fair-weather clouds billowing up over the mountain ridges and melting into the blue summer sky, the glitter of the Laag's water beyond the trees, the white glint of sunlight on all the leaves—these things she noticed more as silent sounds, audible only to her inner ear, rather than as visible images. With her wimple pulled forward over her brow, Kristin sat and listened to the play of light and shadow across the valley.n

It is a great work of humanity, this.

n  Now, whenever she took the old path home past the site of the smithy—and by now it was almost overgrown, with tufts of yellow bedstraw, bluebells, and sweet peas spilling over the borders of the lush meadow—it seemed almost as if she were looking at a picture of her own life:” the weather-beaten, soot-covered old hearth that would never again be lit by a fire. The ground was strewn with bits of coal, but thin, short, gleaming tendrils of grass were springing up all over the abandoned site. And in the cracks of the old hearth blossomed fireweed, which sows its seeds everywhere, with its exquisite, long red tassels.n

This is an unforgettable trilogy situated in 14th-century Norway. It is the life story of an upper-class woman whose thoughtful, religious, questioning, and self-aware nature contrasts with the reckless, wild, and dashing actions of the man she meets, loves, marries, bears children for, clashes with, and can never bear to lose.

Originally published in three volumes, this trilogy chronicles an early 14th century Norwegian woman, mistress of a substantial estate, from childhood through her death half a century later. Undset is a Nobel Prize in Literature winner, so it is not surprising that her prose is solid, although not particularly poetic. What I really enjoyed about this novel was the opportunity to be immersed in a time whose daily cultural details I know little about. This was published nearly a century ago, so I do not know if subsequent historical research has altered our understanding of daily life in 14th century Norway, but I suspect that this novel gets more right than not.

I've seen Kristin Lavransdatter described as a book about a young woman who "defies her family and faith to follow the passions of her heart." Well, yes. But while today that might be seen as a virtue, it is decidedly not portrayed as such in Kristin Lavransdatter. This is not a feminist book. Despite how often Sigrid Undset wrote about "the immoral kind" of love, she was no proponent of the burgeoning emancipation movement. She is fairly unique among those who write about illicit love because she focuses less on the act than on the consequences of the act.

This is a book about sin and redemption. The consequences of Kristin choosing herself before God — a thing called sin — echo, and echo, and echo for the rest of her life, affecting not only Kristin herself but everyone she loves.

One might dismiss the effects of sin in the book as being simply the effects of guilt and the social burdens imposed by the time period depicted, and say that now that we have destroyed the concept of sin and of guilt we are better off. But the effects are not all internal to Kristin and cannot all be dismissed as a product of guilt. And what is wrong with guilt? Only in rare cases does one feel excessive or harmful guilt that one should not feel. In most cases, as in Kristin's case, guilt is simply the voice of one's conscience. To fail to heed it is to shut down an integral part of one's self.

Undset understood sin. She understood that it is a real thing, with real consequences. She understood its nature as choosing the self over God. And she understood that redemption comes, ultimately, from the cross, as evidenced by the aptly titled final portion of her book.

I am not at all surprised that Undset converted to Catholicism soon after writing Kristin Lavransdatter — I'm just astonished that she wasn't Catholic when she wrote it!

One of the greatest novels ever written. After the immortal Divine Comedy, Kristin Lavransdatter enjoys a place in the upper echelon of Catholic fiction next to Brideshead Revisited. Set in fourteenth century Norway, this book truly captures the genius of the medieval spirit. No doubt this is due in part to the fact that author Sigrid Undset, besides being a convert to Catholicism, was the daughter of an archaeologist, and thus grew up immersed in the medieval world in a unique way. Undset is one of Norway's greatest authors: besides her Nobel prize in literature, witness the fact that she was featured on the 500 Kroner banknote (roughly the equivalent of the US $50 bill).
The novel follows its title character from her birth to her death. Originally published as three books, and in total weighing in at some 1100 pages, few themes are foreign to Kristin Lavransdatter. But above all, I think it could be said to be a story about the relationship between children and parents—first between a daughter and her father, then between a mother and her sons. I had the great joy of reading this book knowing nothing else besides the fact that it was a jewel of Scandinavian literature, and that it had been recommended to me by several friends whose opinions I especially respect. I would caution you not to read any introductory material—the book flap of the Penguin Classics edition spoils the plot of book one in two sentences! I listened to the 2017 audio book production from Audible, which was of good quality, though occasionally marred by a strangeness of emphasis that could have been correct within the context of the sentence but was wrong for the wider context of the paragraph. In whatever format you enjoy this novel, it is well worth your time, and I place it in my favorite category of books: If read at in the right circumstances and with the right attitude, it could change one's life!