OLAV AUDUNSSØN

Nobel Prize–winning Norwegian author Undset brings her tetralogy of medieval life to a resounding, memorable, and death-haunted close.

Though she is best known for her 1920 trilogy Kristin Lavransdatter, Undset’s most ambitious work may be her Olav Audunssøn series (1925–27), set in a time when Norway was transforming from a land of Viking war chiefs and blood vendettas to a Christian monarchy based on law. At the opening of this story, a young man named Aslak Gunnarssøn asks Olav, now a wealthy landowner in the fjord country west of Oslo, for sanctuary: Aslak has killed a man and is hiding from the law. The reluctant, morose Olav, still haunted by the long-ago death of his wife, Ingunn Steinfinnsdatter, grants Aslak’s wish, but when Aslak falls in love with his young daughter, Cecilia, Olav sends him away. Cecilia’s smile in Aslak’s presence, which “radiated such sweetness and secret joy that Olav couldn’t recall seeing a fairer sight,” soon fades away into gloom. Just so, Olav’s son, Eirik, whom he’s raised as his own although fathered with Ingunn by another man, loses his beloved to an ugly bout of scrofula and, though once a good candidate for the outlaw life, joins a monastery. Lacking heirs, aging and weakening, Olav marries Cecilia off to a loser named Jørund, which introduces still more misery into their daily lives. Cecilia gets her revenge, though, and so, in his own way, does the would-be saint Eirik. The overall glumness of Undset’s concluding volume is of a piece with the earlier books, and it would do a suite of Bergman films proud; the reader should be prepared to accommodate plenty of Nordic darkness punctuated by the occasional flash of a dagger. As always, Undset’s deep knowledge of Catholic doctrine and Scandinavian history informs her work, which, while cheerless and sometimes rather graphic (“Relief set in as soon as he stopped vomiting blood”), is both elegantly written and well translated.

A fine conclusion to an eminently readable classic of modernist historical fiction.