Early life
Sigrid Undset was born on 20 May 1882, at Kalundborg, Denmark, at the handsome childhood home of her mother, Charlotte Undset (1855-1939), on the market place of the small town. Sigrid was the eldest of the couple's three daughters. She came to Norway at the age of two, when her parents moved on account of her father's illness, which forced him to give up further scientific travel in Europe.
She grew up in Kristiania, the capital (the name was changed back to Oslo in 1924). The first eleven years of her life were strongly influenced by her father's serious illness but also by his extensive historical knowledge. At an early age, Sigrid learned not only the secrets of archaeology, but also the mysteries of the Norse sagas and Scandinavian folk songs.
When she was only 11 years old, her father the noted archaeologist, Ingvald Martin Undset (1853-1893), died at the age of 40. Her mother was left to cope single-handedly with three young daughters, on very slim means. This family tragedy left its mark on Sigrid Undset's childhood and adolescence. Her hopes of a university education had to be abandoned. Having passed the intermediate school (Middelskole) examination, she took a one-year secretarial course, and, at the age of 16, got a job as secretary with a major German-owned engineering company in Kristiania. It was necessary for her to earn money to help her mother and her two younger sisters. She worked with the same company for 10 years as a secretary, gradually assuming a highly trusted position. There were times when she detested office work, feeling she was wasting her time and her youth. But it gave her insight into a major industrial enterprise, taught her how to work systematically, and made her into an expert typist. She later exhibited a considerable talent for organisation, both as housewife and subsequently as chairman of the Society of Norwegian Authors. Furthermore, systematic office routine undoubtedly taught her a good deal about how to proceed with major literary works such as her serial novels.
Writer
But the ten years of office work were a torment to Sigrid Undset. Late at night, and during weekends and holidays, she stole the time to write. Sigrid was no more than 16 years old when she made her first hesitant attempt at writing a novel set in the Nordic Middle Ages. For several years, she wrestled with the subject. At the same time, she read a lot, acquiring a thorough knowledge of Nordic as well as foreign literature, English in particular.
She was deeply moved by Shakespeare, enthusiastic about Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, and attracted by legends of King Arthur. But she also immersed herself in the work of Scandinavian writers, such as Ibsen, August Strindberg, and Georg Brandes. She was also a great admirer of British authors such as the Brontë sisters and Jane Austen. On her own initiative and in her spare time she thus acquired a sound knowledge of the art of writing, preparing herself for what she felt from an early age to be her "fate" in life.
The manuscript of Undset's first novel was ready by the time she was 22. It was the result of burning the midnight oil for many years. It was an historical novel set in Medieval Denmark, clearly of the romantic school. The manuscript was turned down by the publishing house, and to Undset this was a devastating blow. All the same, two years later, she had completed another manuscript; much less voluminous this time, only 80 pages. She had put aside the Middle Ages, and had instead produced a realistic description of a woman with a petit-bourgeois background in contemporary Kristiania. The title was Fru Marta Oulie, with an opening sentence which scandalised the readers: "I have been unfaithful to my husband." These were the words of the book's main character. This book was also refused at first, but after the intervention of a well-known writer of the time, it was subsequently accepted.
Thus, at the age of 25, Sigrid Undset made her literary debut with a short, realistic novel on adultery, set against a contemporary background. It created a stir, and she found herself ranked as a promising young author in Norway. During the years up to 1919, Undset published a number of novels set in contemporary Kristiania. The 10 years at the office had been lonely and difficult ones, but they had given her a foothold in the world of unimportant, everyday people; those who bravely, if not necessarily heroically, strove to find some happiness in life. Undset was a shy, rather introverted young woman with few personal friends. But she had unusually sharp eyes, she saw people, and she saw through them. Her way of breaking out of her loneliness was to take long strolls in and around Kristiania, both east and west, and she came to know it better than most. Her contemporary novels of the period 1907-1918 include all this...the city and its insignificant inhabitants, the monotonous boarding house existence of secretaries in a gloomy town, their longing for a little warmth and love, and their brave, not to say heroic, rejection of seediness. These are the stories of working people, of trivial family destinies, of the relationship between parents and children, written with warmth, but soberly, and completely unsentimentally. Her main subjects are women and their love. Or, as she herself put it...in her typically curt and ironic manner -- "the immoral kind" (of love).
This realistic period culminated in the novels Jenny in 1911 and Vaaren (Spring) in 1914. The first is about a woman painter who, as a result of romantic crises, believes that she is wasting her life, and in the end commits suicide. The other tells of a woman who succeeds in saving both herself and her love from a serious matrimonial crisis, finally creating a secure family. These books placed Undset more or less clearly apart from the incipient women's emancipation movement in Europe...perhaps not exactly against it, but on an entirely different level.
Undset's books sold well from the start, and after the publication of her third book, she quit the office job, and prepared to live on her income as a writer. Having been granted a writer's scholarship, she set out on a lengthy journey in Europe. After short stops in Denmark and Germany, she continued to Italy, arriving in Rome in December 1909, where she remained for nine months.
Undset's parents had had a close relationship with Rome. As a matter of fact, Sigrid should have been born in Rome while her parents lived there in 1882. But just before her birth, her father became suddenly and seriously ill, her parents traveled north in a great hurry to her mother's home at Kalundborg, and that is where Sigrid was born. However, Undset herself very likely felt that her proper place of birth was Rome, and during her stay there in 1909 she followed in her parents' footsteps.
The encounter with Southern Europe meant a great deal to her. She immediately made friends within the circle of Scandinavian artists and writers in Rome, and she became more open, and more outgoing and lively in her relations with other people.
Marriage
In Rome, she met Anders Castus Svarstad, a Norwegian painter, whom she married two or three years later. She was then 30 and, most likely, he was her first love. Svarstad was nine years older, he was married, and had a wife and three children in Norway. Their meeting must have been a case of love at first sight, but it was nearly three years before Svarstad got his divorce.
They were married in 1912, and went to stay in London for six months. Svarstad painted, and Undset developed strong ties with English arts and letters, which were to be of decisive importance to her for the rest of her life. From London, they returned to Rome, where Sigrid's first child was born in January 1913. It was a boy, and he was named after his father.
Marriage, and the other children who came later, meant a great deal to Sigrid Undset, both as a person and as a woman. But it was a serious dilemma for the creative artist. In the years of marriage up to 1919, she had three children of her own, and a large, busy household to look after; one which also included Svarstad's three children from his first marriage. They were difficult years for Sigrid Undset. Her second child, a girl, was mentally handicapped, and Svarstad's mentally handicapped son also lived with them. She kept an open and busy house for the large family and for old and new friends.
Divorce
At the same time, she continued writing at night, after the others had gone to bed, finishing her last realistic novels and collections of short stories. She also entered the public debate on the most topical themes: women's emancipation, ethical and moral issues. She had considerable polemical gifts, and was categorically critical of emancipation as it was developing, and of the moral and ethical decline she felt was threatening in the wake of the First World War.In 1919, she moved to Lillehammer, a small town in the Gudbrandsdalen, a valley in south-east Norway, taking her two children with her. She was expecting her third child. The idea was that she should take a rest at Lillehammer and move back to Kristiania as soon as Svarstad had their new house in order. However, it was not to be.Instead, the marriage broke down. In August 1919, Sigrid Undset gave birth to her third child, at Lillehammer. She decided to make Lillehammer her home, and within two years, Bjerkebæk, her large, beautiful house, was completed. It was a property consisting of three large, handsome houses of traditional Norwegian timber architecture, and a big, fenced garden with lovely views of the town and the villages around. Her ailing daughter and the two boys now had a secure and exceptionally beautiful home. At last, after years of moves and changes, Sigrid Undset had a quiet place to which she could retreat from the world at large in order to do the one thing she now knew she was really good at...writing.
Kristin Lavransdatter
After the birth of her third child, and she had a secure roof over her head, she started on Kristin Lavransdatter, a major project indeed. She was completely at home in the subject matter, having written a short novel at an earlier stage, about a period in Norwegian history closer to the Pre-Christian era. She had also published a Norwegian retelling of the Arthurian legends. She studied Old Norse manuscripts and Medieval chronicles. She also visited and closely examined Medieval churches and monasteries, both at home and abroad. She was now an authority on the period she was struggling to portray, and a very different person from the 22-year-old who had written her first novel about the Middle Ages.
What had happened to her in the meantime has to do with more than history and literature, it has just as much to do with her development as a person. She had experienced love, and passion, to the bitter end. She had been in despair over a sick world in the throes of the bloodbath of the First World War. When she started on Kristin Lavransdatter in 1919, she knew what life was about.
Kristin Lavransdatter is, of course, a historical novel. But it is more than that. The historical aspects are not even the most important part of it. The historical background is precise, realistic, and never romanticised. This is by no means a writer's escape from the Modern age into vague longings for the past. Instead, in these three volumes Undset transfers the human emotions of happiness and sorrow, love and despair, into a distant past. Not in order to romanticise them, however, Sigrid Undset's choice of the Middle Ages is a result of her admiration for the culture of Medieval Christendom.
She transfers the protagonists to a distant past in order to establish the distance the author needs, in order to create a work of art from her own strong feelings and strict thoughts. She was aware of being on the threshold of something new in her life as a writer. She searched for, and found the necessary distance by going back to the Middle Ages. "I am finding my feet, and quite unaided at that," she wrote to a friend.
It is life's mystery, as she knows it from her own experience, that she writes about in Kristin Lavransdatter. That is why these 1,400 pages, as well as the 1,200 on Olav Audunssøn, are timeless. All of her character, however minor, are every bit as complex and multifaceted as characters in Shakespeare. In addition, Madame Undset placed them in a time and place which similarly springs to life. It is the city of Oslo she knew so well, the valley - Gudbrandsdalen - that she loved, and her father's Trøndelag region.
It was only after the end of her marriage that Sigrid Undset grew mature enough to write her masterpiece. In the years between 1920 and 1927 she first published the 3-volume Kristin, and then the 4-volume Olav (Audunssøn), swiftly translated into English as The Master of Hestviken. Simultaneously with this creative process, she was engaged in trying to find meaning in her own life, finding the answer in the Christian God.
Catholicism
Both Sigrid Undset's parents were atheist intellectuals and although, in accord with the norm of the day, she and her two younger sisters were baptised and with their mother regularly attended the local Lutheran church, the milieu in which they were raised was a thoroughly secular one. Undset spent much of her life as an agnostic, but marriage and the outbreak of World War I were to change her attitudes. During those difficult years she experienced a crisis of faith, almost imperceptible at first, then increasingly strong. The crisis led her from clear agnostic scepticism, by way of painful uneasiness about the ethical decline of the age, towards Christianity.
In all her writing one senses an observant eye for the mystery of life and for that which cannot be explained by reason or the human intellect. At the back of her sober, almost brutal realism, there is always an inkling of something unanswerable. At any rate, this crisis radically changed her views and ideology. Whereas she had once believed that man created God, she eventually came to believe that God created man.
However, she did not turn to the established Lutheran Church of Norway, where she had been nominally reared. She was received into the Roman Catholic Church in November 1924, after thorough instruction from the Catholic priest assigned to her home district. She was 42 years old at the time.
In Norway Sigrid Undset's conversion to Catholicism was not only considered sensational; it was scandalous. It was also noted abroad, where her name was becoming known through the international success of Kristin Lavransdatter. At the time, there were very few practicing Catholics in Norway, which was an almost exclusively Lutheran country. "Anti-Catholicism" was widespread not only among the Lutheran clergy, but through large sections of the population. There was just as much scorn for Catholicism among the largely secular Norwegian intelligentsia, many of whom were adherents of Socialism and Communism. The attacks against her faith and character were quite vicious at times, with the result that Sigrid Undset's literary talents were aroused in response. For many years she participated in the public debate, going out of her way to defend the Roman Catholic Church. In response, she was swiftly dubbed, "The Mistress of Bjerke-bæk," and "The Catholic Lady."
Later life
At the end of this creative eruption, Sigrid Undset entered calmer waters. After 1929, she completed a series of novels set in contemporary Oslo, with a strong Catholic element. She selected her themes from the small, though interesting Catholic community in Norway. But here also, the main theme is love. She also published a number of weighty historical works, which undoubtedly did their bit in putting the history of Norway into a more sober perspective. In addition, she translated several Icelandic sagas into Modern Norwegian and published a number of literary essays, mainly on English literature, of which a long essay on the Brontë sisters, and one on D. H. Lawrence, are especially worth mentioning. These are not great literature, but they are strong and inspiring.
In 1934, she published Eleven Years Old, an autobiographical work. With a minimum of camouflage, it tells the story of her own childhood in Kristiania, of her home, rich in intellectual values and love, and of her sick father. It is one of the most fetching Norwegian books ever written about a little girl, surpassed by very few. Sigrid Undset was passing from strength to strength.
At the end of the 1930s she commenced work on a new historical novel set in 18th century Scandinavia. Only the first volume, Madame Dorthea, was published in 1939. The Second World War broke out that same year and proceeded to break her, both as a writer and as a woman. She never completed her new novel. When Joseph Stalin's invasion of Finland touched off the Winter War, Sigrid Undset supported the Finnish war effort by donating her Nobel Prize on 25 January 1940.
Exile
When Germany invaded Norway in April 1940, she was forced to flee. She had strongly criticised Hitler since the early 1930s, and from an early date her books were banned in Nazi Germany. She had no wish to be imprisoned by the Germans, and fled to Sweden. Her eldest son, Anders Svarstad, was killed in action at the age of 27, on 27 April 1940, only a few kilometres from their home at Bjerke-bæk. He was a Second Lieutenant in the Norwegian Army and was killed in an encounter with German troops at Segalstad Bridge in Gausdal. Her sick daughter had died shortly before the outbreak of the War. Bjerke-bæk was occupied by the German Army, and used as officers' quarters during the Occupation of Norway by Nazi Germany.
In 1940, Sigrid Undset and her younger son left neutral Sweden for the United States. There, she untiringly pleaded her occupied country's cause and that of Europe's Jews, in writings, speeches and interviews. She lived in Brooklyn Heights, New York. She was active in St. Ansgar's Scandinavian Catholic League and wrote several article for its Bulletin.
Return to Norway and Death
She returned to Norway after the liberation in 1945, worn out. She lived for another four years, but she never wrote another word. Sigrid Undset died at the age of 67 in Lillehammer, Norway, where she had lived from 1919 through 1940.
Honors
Sigrid Undset was honored in a variety of ways. The most notable was the Nobel prize for literature. Also, a crater on the planet Venus was named after her (Latitude 51.7°, Longitude 60.8°, Diameter 20 KM). Additionally, she has been depicted on a Norwegian 500 Kroner and two Kroner postage stamp from 1982. Neighboring Sweden put her on a stamp in 1998.
Bjerkebæk, Sigrid Undset's home in Lillehammer, is now part of Maihaugen museum. The farmhouse was listed in 1983. Efforts to restore and furnish the houses as they were during the time of her occupancy were begun in 1997. New public buildings were opened in May 2007.
