Kristin Lavransdatter
SynopsisPlot
In her great historical epic Kristin Lavransdatter, set in fourteenth-century Norway, Nobel laureate Sigrid Undset tells the life story of one passionate and headstrong woman. Painting a richly detailed backdrop, Undset immerses readers in the day-to-day life, social conventions, and political and religious undercurrents of the period. Now in one volume, Tiina Nunnally’s award-winning definitive translation brings this remarkable work to life with clarity and lyrical beauty.
Story
About this book
Kristin Lavransdatter is a trilogy by Sigrid Undset, set in fourteenth-century Norway. It follows the life of Kristin, a strong-willed woman, from her childhood in the Gudbrandsdal valley through marriage, motherhood, and old age. The three parts, originally published between 1920 and 1922, trace her choices and their consequences across decades, against a landscape of farms, fjords, churches, and medieval trading towns.
Undset builds the story around the details of daily life in this period: how households were run, how marriages were arranged, how the Catholic Church shaped social expectations, and how political tensions between noble families and the crown played out at the local level. Kristin's personal struggles with love, loyalty, and faith are set firmly inside these structures, giving the novel both an intimate and a broad historical scope.
This edition collects the trilogy in a single volume, using Tiina Nunnally's English translation. Undset received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1928, with the committee citing Kristin Lavransdatter among her principal achievements. She drew on extensive research into medieval Scandinavian sources, and much of the story unfolds in regions of central Norway she knew from her own life.
