WARNING: Huge spoilers on an old boring book by a Noble-prize winner
I wasn’t sure how to start this essay. I wasn’t sure whether to mention and describe our assumptions about the historical literature of the (broadly understood) past. Eventually, I decided to not reflect on it.
Because it’s a fact, not an opinion, that historical works have been always about author’s time, not only about the time of its own. Is this as old as Chaucer imposing medieval chivalric values on ancient Greeks in The Knight’s Tale? It may be or may be not.
Let’s examine the mirror of author’s time on a specific example. On Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset.
There are perfectly medieval things there, like the huge level of illiteracy, even among knights, and superstitions on everything, from pregnancy to elves. Yes. Elves. Magical realism, you know. But there are also things telling more about us and about Sigrid Undset than about Middle Ages.
Set in the fourteenth century Norway, it tells the story of Kristin, a landowner’s daughter marrying a reckless knight called Erlend Nikulausson. Simon Darre, Kristin’s former fiance, eventually marries Ramborg, the younger sister of Kristin and the youngest daughter of Lavrans and Ragnfrid.
The questions of those marriages is, to my mind, what the author must have shifted a bit to make it acceptable for the 1920s readers.
Because I’m sure that already a hundred years ago, people weren’t very enthusiastic about fifteen-years-old being married. That’s way when Ramborg marries at such age, many characters—including her husband—express a doubt whether she isn’t too young. Her parents, meanwhile, were married, respectively, at the age of eighteen and twenty-one. And Kristin becomes Erlend’s wife at nineteen.
Please don’t tell the author that among nobs (they didn’t need to save money and thus to wait with tying the knot), mid-teens getting married weren’t such an extraordinary view. People marrying roughly in their twenties, especially women, were rarer.
Please don’t tell it to the author. And please don’t tell it to me. Because I prefer Undset’s vision.
Another question are the main Good Guys of the trilogy: Lavrans and Simon Darre. Even if they sometimes express opinions which sound sexist to a modern reader, they never beat a woman (unlike Erlend). They seek women’s counsel and treat them like friends, not like property. They are either always faithful (like Lavrans) or they cheat because they are lonely trapped in a marriage-of-reason (like Simon with his first wife Halfrid).
It isn’t that I don’t appreciate it. I do, and I like Lavrans and Simon. Damnably. But an average medieval guy could have bitten his wife to correct her and to cheat on her because men have their needs, and remain liked and respected in the community. But we as the readers—either now or a hundred years earlier—wouldn’t appreciate such dudes.
As you can see, there are things which Undset has improved to match her own times. But there are also things she introduces out of her personal spiritual needs and experience.
Like the whole question of religion.
Wait, you may ask, do you mean that the people from Middle Ages weren’t religious? They were. But it’s quite possible that Undset’s religiosity—she choose Catholic Church on her own request being a former Protestant—was different from the one in Middle Ages. She wasn’t brought up as a Catholic. While medieval people were and judging from Decameron, they often followed their religion because the others were doing so, not because their reflection on spirituality was particularly deep. Don’t get me wrong—it’s fascinating to see characters who ponder on their beliefs and discuss them, the way Kristin and her parents are doing it. Still, I think that Erlend—sometimes superstitious, sometimes anti-clerical, and pious mostly when it is required—might have been a more typical medieval Christian than the more engaged characters. Thus, it is quite possible that the way religion is described in Kristin Lavransdatter is not only about author’s research but about her personal beliefs as well.
And there’s one more thing. The thing which was shocking for the 1920s readers (some of course accused Undset of immorality) and which was still surprising to me as I read Kristin Lavransdatter the first time.
This trilogy is about extramarital sex and extramarital pregnancies.
Kristin and Erlend have an illicit affair and eventually, she gets married being secretly pregnant. Erlend has illegitimate kids on his former lover Eline. Erlend’s kinsmen have illegitimate kids. The first and the second son of Kristin and Erlend produce bastards too. Simon Darre has an illegitimate daughter. His sister gives birth to a son after her fiance’s death. Ragnfrid cheated on Lavrans once. There’s a lot of it, really. Those medieval pious people. So restrained and virtous indeed. And those traditional families.
Oh yes, Mrs. Undset. That wasn’t probably your intent but you’ve convinced me that no matter Traditional Values, people have always behaved the same, beyond the prescriptions of their beliefs and society. You’ve also convinced me that it was happening in a way understandable to us, not in the gritty way one guy from USA, Mr. Martin, likes to show it.
Thank you so much for your inspiring work, Mrs. Undset.
Left Hand of Fiction 