n  To her, it felt as if her soul had sunk down into an impenetrable darkness where it was blindly waging a battle with the alarming, strange creature residing within her. Day and night it tumbled around, demanding more room and trying to burst open her aching body. Occasionally she thought she could bear it no longer. She had such pain in her whole body that she could hardly see, for not even at night did she dare loosen the bindings that caused her such agonizing torment. But she could not surrender; she had to make it stop until it moved no more.
A certain memory kept whirling through her mind during this time. Once, when she and her sister were small, Tora’s tabby cat had killed a bird that Olav had caught for Ingunn so she might tame it. The cat had just had kittens, so Ingunn stole two of them and ran down to the pond and held them underwater. She expected them to die as soon as they went in, but for the longest time the tiny animals kept on kicking and flailing for their lives as she held them in her hands, while little air bubbles rose to the surface. At last she thought they were dead; but no, there was still some movement. Then she pulled them out and ran back to place them next to the mother cat. But by then they were finally dead.
She never thought of it as her own child, this mysterious life that she could feel growing inside her and moving about with increasing strength, defying all her attempts to subdue it. It was nothing more than some shapeless, wild, and painful living thing that had forced its way inside to gorge itself on her marrow and blood—a terrifying thing that she had to conceal. How it would behave when it eventually came into the light, and what would happen to her if anyone found out she had carried such a creature—those were things she dared not even think about.n

notes: these poor, simple children!

This is now the fifth book I've read by Sigrid Undset, and I do enjoy her work. Like the "Kristin Lavransdatter" trilogy, "The Axe" takes place in medieval Norway, and Undset writes that setting so evocatively. The authenticity (at least as it feels to me) of her descriptions and prose and dialogue and intricacy of world-building could easily convince me that she was writing in the 13th century, not in the 20th. I appreciated that although there were some similar themes, this was not too much like her earlier trilogy; "The Axe" is focused half on the male and half on the female protagonist and the storylines are very different. Though this is a complex and not an easy read by any means, I found myself surprisingly drawn in by the characters and their fates and highly invested in what happened, even if I wasn't always totally sure what had gone down at times because of how it was written.

Aspects of "The Axe" reminded me of "Tess of the D'Urbervilles" as well as Undset's earlier work— definitely an interest in the lack of agency a woman has over her own life and the consequences that women face as a result of the actions of men. Like "Tess," this is a real bummer with misfortune after misfortune. However, there was enough beauty in the tragic plot that I was glad I read it overall.

Yes, yes, yes, and I have 3 more in this series to read!