Sigrid Undset: Reader of Hearts

By Aidan Nichols

Novelist Sigrid Undset (1882–1949) left a mark on twentieth-century literature, not only in her homeland of Norway, but across the West. Her painterly eye for the Scandinavian countryside, her uncompromising emotional realism, her concrete sense of history, her bold vision of woman and man—these won her such acclaim that she received the 1928 Nobel Prize for Literature, not long after the publication of her epic historical novel, Kristin Lavransdatter.

During World War II, she loudly opposed anti-Semitism and the Nazi regime, and in the final years of her life, the Norwegian state awarded her the Grand Cross of the Order of Saint Olav—the first time this honor was given to a woman outside the royal family. Among her other celebrated works are the novels The Master of Hestviken and Ida Elisabeth, as well as a powerful biography of Catherine of Siena.

But something else set Undset apart. In 1924, she converted to Roman Catholicism, alienating her from Protestants and secular intellectuals alike. This spiritual turn shaped the very heart of her work, as well as her own life as a mother. In a world pockmarked by suffering, disappointment, and cruelty, she discovered that Jesus Christ alone gives meaning to the word "love".

Acclaimed theologian and spiritual writer Father Aidan Nichols takes on the figure of Sigrid Undset from a distinctively Christian point of view. Rich in both biography and textual analysis, Sigrid Undset: Reader of Hearts renders a shrewd, colorful account of a writer who allowed her art to be transfigured by the fire of God's mercy and, thus, to be opened to a beauty beyond all telling.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ignatius Press
• Release date: May 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781642292206

Aidan Nichols

Aidan Nichols, O.P., is a Dominican friar who has taught theology in England, Italy, the United States, and Ethiopia. He held the John Paul II Memorial Lectureship in Roman Catholic Theology and was for many years a Member of the Cambridge University Faculty of Divinity. He has published over fifity books on a variety of topics in fundamental, historical, and ecumenical theology, as well as on the relation of religion to literature and art. His books include Lovely Like Jerusalem, Conciliar Octet, Figuring Out the Church, Rome and the Eastern Churches, and The Theologian's Enterprise. 

Book preview

SIGRID UNDSET

Aidan Nichols, O.P.

SIGRID UNDSET

Reader of Hearts

IGNATIUS PRESS  SAN FRANCISCO

Cover art

Portrait of Sigrid Undset

Harald Slott-Moller, 1923

© Photo: O. Vaering Eftf. AS, Norway

Cover design by Riz Boncan Marsella

© 2022 by Ignatius Press, San Francisco

All rights reserved

ISBN 978-1-62164-507-8 (PB)

ISBN 978-1-64229-220-6 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number 2021941888

Printed in the United States of America ♾

Contents

Preface

1 The Beginnings

2 Back to Norway

3 The Writer, the Lover

4 The Social Polemicist

5 Conversion

6 The Thirties, or the Coming of War

7 The Novelist’s Themes

8 The Theological Controversialist

9 The Hagiographer

Conclusion

Bibliography

More from Ignatius Press

Notes

Preface

Perhaps because, as a boy, I enjoyed looking at reproductions of Pre-Raphaelite paintings, I was really struck, as a Dominican novice, by reading Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter. A biographer of Undset explains the affinity: These Pre-Raphaelites, as they were called, specialized in an exquisitely detailed realism which they combined with atmospheric and symbolic motifs from the Middle Ages, not unlike the approach that Undset used in a literary sense in her medieval novels.¹ Sigrid Undset had absorbed the Pre-Raphaelite paintings she saw in London galleries during her honeymoon in 1912. The happy couple—happy, that is, for the time being—had stayed in a guesthouse in William Morris’ Hammersmith. She would go on to emulate Morris’ design ideas in furnishing her house, Bjerkebaek, at Lillehammer from 1919 onwards. So one can well believe she was influenced by the Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic. But she also had from her father, a professional archeologist, the passion of an antiquarian for exact knowledge of the past, and the flair of an historian for sensing the direction of wider trends.²

Sigrid Undset was, however, a contemporary not of Morris or Dante Gabriel Rossetti but of Virginia Woolf. Those of her novels that are set in the modern age offer that combination of realistic observation and stream-of-consciousness writing that one associates with the literary fiction of the twentieth century. Their psychological insight is remarkable. It is another good reason for taking her seriously. In the understanding of Sigrid Undset’s literary work, my debt to the Norwegian critic Liv Bliksrud, the editor of her complete Essays and Articles, will be obvious from the text and footnotes.³

Outside her fictional writings, Sigrid Undset was also a social commentator of great acuity, a moralist concerned to revivify the classical and the Christian virtues, and an unapologetic apologist for the Catholic religion. The combination explains the continuing engagement with her work of public intellectuals in Norway today.⁴ Her attitude to feminism, the roots of her conversion in her ethical critique of modernity, the character of her Catholicism, the value of her writing to clinical psychology, and her use of historical materials preoccupied commentators on the centenary of her birth.⁵ The interest of her personality, not confined to her formal writing, adds a certain piquancy to the mix.⁶

Her unabashed defence of dogma—above all the key Christological doctrines of Incarnation and Atonement, of the Eucharistic Sacrifice and Presence, and of the indissolubility of sacramental marriage—may not make her popular among all shades of Church opinion in the twenty-first century. But for orthodox believers they retain their sterling value.

These, then, along with memories of my own happy days in Norway, are my excuses for writing this study now. Finishing this study at a time of pandemic has not been easy, especially when domiciled in Jamaica. I am very grateful to the accommodation provided during an all-too-short study stay in Cambridge by Professor and Mrs John Rist, and in Dorchester-on-Thames by Father John Osman, as well as the library services of Professor Richard Rex of the Queens’ College, Cambridge, and Professor Eamon Duffy of Magdalene College, Cambridge, which made its writing possible. I must also thank Frater Arne Fjeld of Sankt Dominikus Kloster in Oslo for sending me a pre-publication copy of the splendid multi-authored volume which marks the centenary (2021) of the renewed Dominican presence in Norway, a work in which Sigrid Undset’s name occurs on numerous occasions.

St. Michael’s Seminary and Theological College

Kingston, Jamaica

Memorial of Saint Ǿystein, 2021

1

The Beginnings

Sigrid Undset was born on 20 May 1882 at Kalundborg in Denmark to a Danish mother—with Norwegian paternal ancestry—and a Norwegian father. She had the company of her mother for much more of her life than was given her to enjoy her father. But her father had the greater influence nonetheless.

Ingvald Martin Undset was twenty-nine when his eldest child was born, and he was already an acknowledged authority in the field of Iron Age archaeology in Europe. The Undset family had been small farmers in the eastern valleys of middle Norway. Ingvald’s father and mother were pious Protestants of a distinctive brand. They were Herrnhut Pietists, described by one of Sigrid Undset’s biographers as both inside the State Church and a little to the side of it.¹ It was presumably in a spirit of religious responsibility that Sigrid’s grandfather took up the unenviable task of running a workhouse for former prostitutes outside Trondheim, the regional capital. He has been called, not very flatteringly, "a rather typical half-urbanised man from the national oppbygningstid [age of reconstruction] after 1814.² The year 1814 was when the Norwegians declared their independence from Denmark (though, under pressure from the Quintuple Alliance, the Danish king took the initiative in releasing Norwegians from their allegiance) and adopted the Eidsvoll Constitution", which survived the century-long union of crowns with Sweden that ensued.³ Sigrid Undset respected and loved this grandfather in the paternal line.

Her father, Ingvald Undset, was born in Trondheim in 1853, and already as a child began to acquire his lifelong passion for Norwegian antiquities, exploring the semiruined Gothic cathedral of the former Nidaros, once a metropolitanate with far-flung dependent bishoprics from the Isle of Man to Greenland. Architectural remains were rich—the erkebispgaard (the buildings occupied by the medieval archbishops and their curia); Munkholmen, formerly a Cluniac abbey; and Elgeseter, the first Augustinian canonry in Norway, prominent among them. The great cathedral itself was beginning the century-long work of restoration during Ingvald Undset’s teenage years.⁴ He received an excellent education at Norway’s oldest Latin school, founded in 1031, and joined the conservationist society Forening til Norges Fortidsminnesmerkers Bevaring when he was only fourteeen. But he would be a systematic researcher, not a romantic restorer. National Romanticism (whose dates are given, by the premier Anglophone historian of Norway, as 1844–1872) should not, however, be dismissed.⁵ It had numerous gains to its credit, including the saving of what remained of medieval Norway’s unique masterpieces, the elaborately carved stave churches. That was a movement begun not by any historian, but by the Bergen artist Johan Christian Dahl, generally regarded as the first fine artist (kunstmaler) in the modern sense of the word in Norway (the contrast is with craft practitioners). Dahl, incidentally, was the first to present as truly glorious the natural landscape of Norway with whose beauties Sigrid Undset’s prose is replete.⁶

Despite its distance from Continental Europe, Ingvald’s native Trondheim was not a backwater. The scholars’ union, Det Kongelige Norske Videnskabers Selskap, was based there, and there too around 1800 Norway’s first theatre opened. In 1814 the city had more inhabitants than Christiania—the Danish name of Oslo, whose spelling was Norwegianised as Kristiania in 1877 before reverting to its medieval name twenty years after full independence, in 1925.

Ingvald devoured the early medieval Icelandic sagas, as well as two standard works on the prehistoric and medieval North: Peter Andreas Munch’s Nordens gamle guder og helte-sagn, and Det norske folks historie, which took the story up to the fourteenth century.⁷ In 1871 the eighteen-year-old Ingvald went to Christiania, a city of some ninety thousand in the process of becoming not just a major commercial centre but also an industrial hub. There he studied archaeology and runology at the Kongelige Frederiks Universitet, which boasted the largest extant collection of Norwegian antiquities (oldsaker), even if this was modest enough to take up only one room. It was a time when, just as in the wake of Darwin zoologists combated theologians, so historians were pitted against National Romantics. His professors typically resisted the separating off of Norse or Germanic patrimony from the rest of Europe. They also appointed him scientific assistant, effectively curator of antiquities, a post he held to the end of his short working life. His real passion, though, was comparative archaeology. In 1876 a study tour to Denmark and visits to other European cities initiated a continuing practice of Europe-wide journeys to congresses, museums, and sites. His 1881 doctorate on Iron Age culture, tracing its progress moving from south to north in Europe, was rapidly translated into German,⁸ though his name was better known to the Norwegian public through culture journalism. With his wife’s help, when he was dying, he edited a series of his articles under the title From Akershus to the Acropolis. Memories of Archaeological Journeys.⁹ Akershus is the medieval fortress of Oslo.

When studying for his doctorate in Copenhagen, Ingvald Undset had met Marie Nicoline Charlotte Gyth, a girl from Kalundborg, the principal port city of West Sjaelland. She was daughter to an attorney and town councillor, Peter Andreas Jensen Gyth, whom Sigrid would remember as a somewhat melancholy and reclusive figure. The family name had apparently been Keith. They were Scots immigrants to Norway who came to Denmark around the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the shape of a son who was studying for the Lutheran pastorate. Charlotte’s mother was herself the daughter of a pastor—not at all a Pietist but a clergyman of the rationalistic Enlightenment variety. On her mother’s early death, her sister, Signe, took her place as housemother. Charlotte was brought up with tutors in French and German, and a drawing master. In due course she would illustrate the archeological reconstructions in Ingvald Undset’s lectures and articles. The Gyth family home, Gyths Gaard, is described as a light-filled house, set in a charming townscape, with well-stocked gardens hidden behind high stone walls, on a square dominated by the five-towered medieval church of Vaar Frue, Our Lady.

Tempted by the study of classical and Etruscan antiquities, the young couple moved via Florence to Rome. Expatriates in the Italian capital included a flourishing Scandinavian community, consisting not only of classicists but also, more especially, of artists (Sigrid would evoke the milieu in her novel Jenny). In the years 1881 and 1882, the celebrated dramatist Henrik Ibsen was also in Rome, and his play Gengangere, Ghosts, was repudiated by many in the North as an exercise in nihilism. It caused shockwaves by the candid way it dealt with syphilis which, after tuberculosis, was the most common serious illness in the Norway of this period. The timing was ominous for the Undsets. In 1882 Ingvald fell ill with an undiagnosed condition. Charlotte had become pregnant with Sigrid, leading to their return to Kalundborg for the baby’s delivery, and, for Ingvald, the first of many visits to Kristiania’s local therapeutic spa, Grefsen Bad. Going south after Sigrid’s birth, doctors at Venice diagnosed syphilis though Ingvald continued to make excursions from a Roman base, especially to Etruscan places.¹⁰

Sigrid would gravitate to Rome once she had gained her financial freedom through the succès de scandale of her short novel Fru Marta Oulie. Perhaps she had regrets for the way her father’s illness had prevented Rome from being her natal city. But then she might have missed out on some early crucial experiences in Denmark and Norway. Her earliest memories (at fifteen months!) in a semi-autobiographical account of a child’s upbringing, Elleve aar (in English, The Longest Years), are highly telluric: grasses swaying in the wind, soil running through her fingers.¹¹ These were counterbalanced by her dawning love of artifacts, starting with a terracotta horse from Troy that the world-famous German archeologist Heinrich Schliemann had given her father.¹²

Once the Storting, the Norwegian Parliament, had made her invalid father a lifelong annual grant in gratitude for his services to scholarship, the family was able to move, in 1884, from Denmark to Kristiania, which, with its immediate environs, would be the setting for most of Sigrid’s writing in her modern—as distinct from neo-medieval—novels.¹³

2

Back to Norway

The Undset family settled near Vestre Aker Church (the originally Romanesque building figures in her earliest neo-medieval short story, the saga-like Gunnar’s Daughter). Here they enjoyed a large garden, close to the woods and farms of Blindern, now the campus of the University of Oslo, in a type of countryside which recurs often enough in her fiction. Her father needed open air, while her mother believed in the value of long country walks for the health of the children (Sigrid’s sister, Ragnhild, had just arrived). So Sigrid was initiated into all of nature’s mysteries,¹ not only memorizing a multitude of flower names (horticulture and botany would play a big part in her life) but also learning a prudent fear of stinging insects and the habits of strange dogs. Not all nature, she discovered, was equally benevolent.

In 1886, owing to Ingvald’s declining mobility, they moved to a spacious flat nearer the city centre. Accommodation was not hard to find; it was a time of building boom (the population would reach two hundred thousand in the next decade). Here in 1887 Sigrid’s second and last sibling, was born. She was named Signe after her Danish aunt. As Ingvald’s disease progressed and his eyesight worsened, the little girl used her precocious literacy to read the Icelandic sagas to him. That would have been in Danish. But already as a child she really wanted to have the original Old Norse.² Sigrid was an eager collector of vocabulary, including Danish and trøendersk, the dialect of her paternal grandparents’ region of Trøndelag. She learned about archaeology and the latest Edda research (the Poetic Edda and the Prose Edda are the main sourcebooks for Norse mythology) simply through listening to her father talking with his wife and colleagues. She read the Norwegian folktales collected by Asbjørnson and Moe, and their Danish parallels in the stories of Hans Christian Andersen, particularly relishing the more bloodthirsty passages.³ Her novels, both modern and medieval, never shy away from gore. An inquisitive and adventurous child, she heard echoes of the debate over Christian Krohg’s novel Albertine, a candid description of Kristiania prostitution.⁴ (Copies were confiscated, but there was little the public prosecutor could do about the paintings illustrative of the novel that Krohg produced.) Her father introduced her to the stories in Homer and the Greek tragedians. He was also a resourceful inventor of narratives in his own right, with a strong emphasis on the contrast between evil and good. More soberly, her mother read with her daughter the histories of Norway and Denmark for schoolchildren by Siegwart Petersen and Niels Christian Rom.⁵ Quite how much her pupil appreciated the latter works is debatable. With her father’s devotion to primary sources in mind, she wrote later of how from childhood I had been trained to look at history without allowing myself to be affected by the more or less libretto-like versions given by the summaries of school-books.⁶ Charlotte Undset also instructed Sigrid in embroidery. Though her first efforts were incompetent, it later became a craft of predilection, and one that was often prized by her heroines, embodying as it does a union of domestic labour with beauty. She held a high view of womanly tasks in the household.

Meanwhile a tragedy was unfolding at home, but in good families in the Norway of the period the direct expression of feeling was considered vulgar and southern (i.e., better suited to the Mediterranean peoples). The Longest Years describes how her family dealt with the situation. Ingvald’s parents’ plea to their agnostic son fell on deaf ears. The lightly fictionalized Charlotte tells her Pietist in-laws that her ailing husband has nothing to be humble about—her response to their appeal for deathbed repentance.⁷ In The Longest Years Sigrid Undset sought to describe her father’s mindset in matters of religion. He avoided talking about it, especially if his parents were present. But he also gave the impression that, whether the mythic material was Greek, Norse, or Christian, there might be something real at the back of it somewhere.

As for herself, she strongly disliked the sentimentality of the Lutheran hymns she heard (yet those by the Danish hymnographer Nikolai Grundtvig, whom she mentions, have their literary and indeed theological admirers⁸). Her religiosity, insofar as she had any, had been, she reflected, essentially pagan. "She thought of God as One behind the course of day and night and the seasons, and so long as He was there she could think of Him reverently and devoutly, with gratitude too for the light and the wind and for everything that tasted and smelt good. But she had not the slightest desire that He should pay too much attention to her doings and her thoughts.⁹ She was, she concluded, entirely unfitted by nature to join in any sort of Grundtvigian sacred harmonic choir".¹⁰

In 1890, after a summer on the Oslofjord, a period of her life rich in perceptions of nature later lent to her characters or to the authorial I, Sigrid began school at a mixed-sex, private, and pedagogically advanced establishment run by a divorcée. She reacted against its prevailing tone, dominated as this was by early feminists (kvinnesaksforkjemper) and liberal Lutheranism. Some notion of the latter can be gleaned from the opinions of Halstein Garnaas in Sigrid’s conversion novel Gymnadenia (The Wild Orchid) (where she also registers her dislike of Grundtvig’s hymns).¹¹ [W]hat we must keep a firm hold of, states Garnaas, is the spirit of the Reformation, and we are not doing so by maintaining dogmas which still had a value for the people of that time as the expression of contemporary religious experience, but which can only act as a hindrance to the thought of the present day.¹² Sigrid Undset was not overly impressed by the thought of the present day. She would remain at this school until 1897, bored as well as irritated by the realisation, acquired from her father, that much of what her teachers stated so assertorically could only be hypothesis. As the family moved again, this time to a ground-floor flat near to the Trefoldighetskirke, and therefore close to Ingvald’s workplace at the original University buildings (his mobility was lessening), she shook off all assumptions of the easy triumph of the good, and any expectation of indefinite progress in the future. She also became a close observer of the streets and shops and their inhabitants. It served her well for her later writing.

In