Kristin Lavransdatter

by Sigrid Undset

  The sound of a lur echoed from the hills: several shrill tones that died away and then reappeared. It sounded as if children were practicing blowing the horn. A distant clanging of bells, the rush of the river fading lazily away, and the deep sighs of the forest in the quiet, warm day. Kristin’s heart trembled anxiously in the silence.

  Homesickness urged her forward; homesickness drew her back toward the village and the manor. Pictures of everyday things teemed before her eyes: She saw herself leaping with the goats along the path through the sparse woods south of their mountain pasture. A cow had strayed into the marsh; the sun was shining brightly. When she paused for a moment to listen, she felt her own sweat stinging her skin. She saw the courtyard back home in swirling snow—a dingy white, stormy day seething toward a wild winter night. She was almost blown back into the entryway when she opened the door; the blizzard took her breath away, but there they came, those two snow-covered bundles, men wearing long fur coats: Ivar and Skule had come home. The tips of their skis sank deep into the great snowdrift that always formed across the courtyard when the wind blew from the northwest. Then there were always huge drifts in two parts of the courtyard. All of a sudden she felt herself longing with love for those two drifts that she and all the manor servants had cursed each winter; she felt as if she were condemned never to see them again.

  Feelings of longing seemed to burst from her heart; they ran in all directions, like streams of blood, seeking out paths to all the places in the wide landscape where she had lived, to all her sons roaming through the world, to all her dead lying under the earth. She wondered: Had she turned cowardly? She had never felt this way before.

  Then she noticed that Gaute was staring at her. She gave him a fleeting, rueful smile. It was time now for them to say goodbye and for her to continue on.

  Gaute called to his horse, which had been grazing across the green hillside. He ran to get him and then came back, and they said farewell. Kristin already had her travel bag over her shoulder and her son was putting his foot into the stirrup when he turned around and took a few steps toward her.

  “Mother!” For a moment she looked into the depths of his helpless, shame-filled eyes. “You haven’t been . . . no doubt you haven’t been very pleased the last few years. Mother, Jofrid means well; she has great respect for you. Even so, I should have told her more about the kind of woman you are and have been all your days.”

  “Why do you happen to think about this now, my Gaute?” His mother’s voice was gentle and surprised. “I’m quite aware that I’m no longer young, and old people are supposed to be difficult to please; all the same, I haven’t aged so much that I don’t have the wits to understand you or your wife. It would trouble me greatly if Jofrid should think that it has been a thankless struggle, after all she has done to spare me work and worry. Do not think, my son, that I fail to see your wife’s virtues or your own loyal love for your mother. If I haven’t shown it as much as you might have expected, you must have forbearance and remember that’s the way old people are.”

  Gaute stared at his mother, open-mouthed. “Mother . . .” Then he burst into tears and leaned against his horse, shaking with sobs.

  But Kristin stood her ground; her voice revealed nothing except amazement and maternal kindness.

  “My Gaute, you are young, and you’ve been my little lamb all your days, as your father used to say. But you must not carry on like this, son. Now you’re the master back home, and a grown man. If I were setting off for Romaborg or Jorsal, well . . . But it’s unlikely that I will encounter any great dangers on this journey. I will find others to keep me company, you know; if not before, then when I reach Toftar. From there groups of pilgrims leave every morning during this time.”

  “Mother, Mother, don’t leave us! Now that we’ve taken all power and authority out of your hands, pushed you aside into a corner . . .”

  Kristin shook her head with a little smile. “I’m afraid my children seem to think I have an overbearing desire to take charge.”

  Gaute turned to face her. She took one of his hands in hers and placed her other hand on his shoulder as she implored him to believe that she was not ungrateful toward him or Jofrid; she asked God to be with him. Then she turned him toward his horse, and with a laugh she gave him a thump between his shoulders for good luck.

  She stood gazing after him until he disappeared beneath the cliff. How handsome he looked riding the big blue-black horse.

  She felt so strange. She sensed everything around her with such unusual clarity: the sun-sated air, the hot fragrance of the pine forest, the chittering of tiny sparrows in the grass. At the same time she was looking inside herself, seeing pictures the way someone with a high fever may believe she is peering at inner images. Inside her there was an empty house, completely silent, dimly lit, and with a smell of desolation. The scene shifted: a tidal shore from which the sea had retreated far away; rounded, light-colored stones, heaps of dark, lifeless seaweed, all sorts of flotsam.

  Then she shifted her travel bag to a more comfortable position, picked up her staff, and set off down toward the valley. If she was not meant to come back, then it was God’s will and useless to be frightened. But more likely it was because she was old. . . . She made the sign of the cross and strode faster, longing just the same to reach the hillside where the road passed among farms.

  Only for one short section of the public road was it possible to see the buildings of Haugen high on the mountain crest. Her heart began hammering at the mere thought.

  As she had predicted, she met more pilgrims when she reached Toftar late in the day. The next morning she was joined by several others as they all set off into the mountains.

  A priest and his servant, along with two women, his mother and sister, were on horseback, and they soon pulled far ahead of those on foot. Kristin felt a pang in her heart as she gazed after another woman riding between her two children.

  In her group there were two older peasants from a little farm in Dovre. There were also two younger men from Oslo, laborers from the town, and a farmer with his daughter and son-in-law, both of them quite young. They were traveling with the young couple’s child, a tiny maiden about eighteen months old, and they had a horse, which they took turns riding. These three were from a parish far to the south called Andabu; Kristin didn’t know exactly where it lay. On the first evening Kristin offered to take a look at the child because she was incessantly crying and moaning; she looked so pitiful with her big, bald head and tiny, limp body. She couldn’t yet talk or sit up on her own. The mother seemed ashamed of her daughter. The next morning when Kristin offered to carry the child for a while, she was left in her care, and the other woman strode on ahead; she seemed a most neglectful mother. But they were so young, both she and her husband, hardly more than eighteen years old, and she must be weary of carrying the heavy child, who was always whining and weeping. The grandfather was an ugly, sullen, and cross middle-aged man, but he was the one who had urged this journey to Nidaros with his granddaughter, so he seemed to have some affection for her. Kristin walked at the back of the group with him and the two Franciscan monks, and it vexed her that the man from Andabu never offered to let the monks borrow his horse. Anyone could see that the younger monk was terribly ill.

  The older one, Brother Arngrim, was a rotund little man with a round, red, freckled face, alert brown eyes, and a fox-red fringe of hair around his skull. He talked incessantly, mostly about the poverty of their daily life—the friars of Skidan. The order had recently acquired an estate in that town, but they were so impoverished that they were barely able to keep up the services, and the church they intended to erect would probably never be built. He placed the blame on the wealthy nuns in Gimsøy, who persecuted the poor friars with rancor and malice, and they had now brought a lawsuit against them. He spoke effusively about all their worst traits. Kristin wasn’t pleased to hear the monk talk in this manner, and she didn’t believe his claims that the abbess had not been chosen in accordance w
ith Church law or that the nuns slept through their daily prayers, gossiped, and carried on unseemly conversations at the table in the refectory. Yes, he even said bluntly that people thought one of the sisters had not remained pure. But Kristin saw that Brother Arngrim was otherwise a good-hearted and kindly man. He carried the ill child for long stretches of the way whenever he saw that Kristin’s arms were growing weary. If the girl began to howl too fiercely, he would set off running across the plain, with his robes lifted high so the juniper bushes scratched his dark, hairy legs and the mud splashed up from the marshy hollows, shouting and hollering for the mother to stop because the child was thirsty. Then he would hurry back to the ill man, Brother Torgils; toward him he was the most tender and loving father.

  The sick monk made it impossible to reach Hjerdkinn that night, but the two men from Dovre knew of a stone hut in a field a little to the south, near a lake, and so the pilgrims headed that way. The evening had turned cold. The shores of the lake were miry, and white mist swirled up from the marshes so the birch forest was dripping with dew. A slender crescent moon hung in the west above the mountain domes, almost as pale yellow and dull as the sky. More and more often Brother Torgils had to stop; he coughed so badly that it was terrible to hear. Brother Arngrim would support him and then wipe his face and mouth afterward, showing Kristin his hand with a shake of his head; it was bloody from the other man’s spit.

  They found the hut, but it had fallen in. Then they looked for a sheltered spot and made a fire. But the poor folks from the south hadn’t expected that a night in the mountains would be so icy cold. Kristin pulled from her travel bag the cape Gaute had urged her to take because it was especially lightweight and warm, made from bought fabric and lined with beaver fur. When she wrapped it around Brother Torgils, he whispered—he was so hoarse that he could barely manage to speak—that the child should be allowed to lie next to him. And so she was placed beside him. She fretted, and the monk coughed, but now and then they both slept for a while.

  Part of the night Kristin kept watch and tended the fire along with one of the Dovre men and Brother Arngrim. The pale yellow glimmer moved northward—the mountain lake lay white and still; fish rose up, rippling the surface—but beneath the towering dome on the opposite side, the water mirrored a deep blackness. Once they heard a hideous snarling shriek from the far shore; the monk cringed and grabbed the other two by the arm. Kristin and the farmer thought it must be some beast; then they heard stones falling, as if someone were walking across the scree over there, and another cry, like the coarse voice of a man. The monk began praying loudly: “Jesus Kristus, Soter,” Kristin heard. And “vicit leo de tribu Juda.”1 Then they heard a door slam somewhere on the slope.

  The gray light of dawn began rising. The scree on the other side and the clusters of birch trees emerged. Then the other Dovre farmer and the man from Oslo relieved them. The last thing Kristin thought about before she fell asleep next to the fire was that if they made such little progress during the day—and she would have to give the friars a gift of money when they parted—then she would soon have to beg food from the farms when they reached Gauldal.

  The sun was already high and the morning wind was darkening the lake with small swells when the frozen pilgrims gathered around Brother Arngrim as he said the morning prayers. Brother Torgils sat huddled on the ground, his teeth chattering, and tried to keep from coughing while he murmured along. When Kristin looked at the two ash-gray monk’s cowls lit by the morning sun, she remembered she had been dreaming of Brother Edvin. She couldn’t recall what it was about, but she kissed the hands of the kneeling monks and asked them to bless her companions.

  Because of the beaver fur cape, the other pilgrims realized that Kristin was not a commoner. And when she happened to mention that she had traveled the king’s road over the Dovre Range twice before, she became a sort of guide for the group. The men from Dovre had never been farther north than Hjerdkinn, and those from Vikvaer did not know this region at all.

  They reached Hjerdkinn just before vespers, and after the service in the chapel Kristin went out into the hills alone. She wanted to find the path she had taken with her father and the place beside the creek where she had sat with him. She didn’t find the spot, but she thought she did find the slope she had climbed up in order to watch as he rode away. And yet the small, rocky hills along that stretch of path all looked much the same.

  She knelt down among the bearberries at the top of the ridge. The light of the summer evening was fading. The birch-covered slopes of the low-lying hills, the gray scree, and the brown, marshy patches all melded together, but above the expanse of mountain plateaus arched the fathomless, clear bowl of the evening sky. It was mirrored white in all the puddles of water; scattered and paler was the mirrored shimmer of the sky in a little mountain stream, which raced briskly and restlessly over rocks and then trickled out onto the sandy bank of a small lake in the marsh.

  Again it came upon her, that peculiar feverlike inner vision. The river seemed to be showing her a picture of her own life: She too had restlessly rushed through the wilderness of her earthly days, rising up with an agitated roar at every rock she had to pass over. Faint and scattered and pale was the only way the eternal light had been mirrored in her life. But it dimly occurred to the mother that in her anguish and sorrow and love, each time the fruit of sin had ripened to sorrow, that was when her earthbound and willful soul managed to capture a trace of the heavenly light.

  Hail Mary, full of grace. Blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus, who gave his sweat and blood for our sake . . .

  As she said five Ave Marias in memory of the painful mysteries of the Redemption, she felt that it was with her sorrows that she dared to seek shelter under the cloak of the Mother of God. With her grief over the children she had lost, with the heavier sorrows over all the fateful blows that had struck her sons without her being able to ward them off. Mary, the perfection of purity, of humility, of obedience to the will of her Father—she had grieved more than any other mother, and her mercy would see the weak and pale glimmer in a sinful woman’s heart, which had burned with a fiery and ravaging passion, and all the sins that belong to the nature of love: spite and defiance, hardened relentlessness, obstinacy, and pride. And yet it was still a mother’s heart.

  Kristin hid her face in her hands. For a moment it seemed more than she could bear: that now she had parted with all of them, all her sons.

  Then she said her last Pater noster. She remembered the leave-taking with her father in this place so many years in the past, and her leave-taking with Gaute only two days ago. Out of childish thoughtlessness her sons had offended her, and yet she knew that even if they had offended her as she had offended her father, with her sinful will, it would never have altered her heart toward them. It was easy to forgive her children.

  Gloria Patri et Filio et Spiritui Sancto, she prayed, and kissed the cross she had once been given by her father, humbly grateful to feel that in spite of everything, in spite of her willfulness, her restless heart had managed to capture a pale glimpse of the love that she had seen mirrored in her father’s soul, clear and still, just as the bright sky now shimmered in the great mountain lake in the distance.

  The next day the weather was so overcast, with such a cold wind and fog and showers, that Kristin was reluctant to continue on with the ill child and Brother Torgils. But the monk was the most eager of them all; she saw that he was afraid he would die before he reached Nidaros. So they set off over the heights, but now and then the rain was so heavy that Kristin didn’t dare head down the steep paths with the sheer cliffs both above and below, which she recalled lay all the way to the hostel at Drivdal. They made a fire when they had climbed to the top of the pass and settled in for the night. After evening prayers Brother Arngrim told a splendid saga about a ship in distress that was saved through the intercession of an abbess who prayed to the Virgin Mary, who made the morning star appear over the sea.

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bsp; The monk seemed to have developed a fondness for Kristin. As she sat near the fire and rocked the child so the others could sleep, he moved closer to her and in a whisper began talking about himself. He was the son of a poor fisherman, and when he was fourteen years old, he lost his father and brother at sea one winter night, but he was rescued by another boat. This seemed to him a miracle, and besides, he had acquired a fear of the sea; that was how he happened to decide that he would become a monk. But for three more years he had to stay at home with his mother, and they toiled arduously and went hungry, and he was always afraid in the boat. Then his sister was wed, and her husband took over the house and share of the fishing boat, and he could go to the Minorites in Tunsberg. At first he was subjected to scorn for his low birth, but the guardian was kind and took him under his protection. And ever since Brother Torgils Olavssøn had entered the brotherhood, all the monks had become more pious and peaceful, for he was so pious and humble, even though he came from the best lineage of any of them, from a wealthy farming family over in Slagn. And his mother and sisters were very generous toward the monastery. But after they had come to Skidan, and after Brother Torgils had fallen ill, everything had once again become difficult. Brother Arngrim let Kristin understand that he wondered how Christ and the Virgin Mary could allow the road to be so full of stones for his poor brothers.

  “They too chose poverty while they lived on this earth,” said Kristin.

  “That’s easy for you to say, being the wealthy woman that you surely must be,” replied the monk indignantly. “You’ve never had to go without food. . . .” And Kristin had to agree that this was true.

  When they made their way down to the countryside and wandered through Updal and Soknadal, Brother Torgils was allowed to ride part of the way, but he grew weaker and weaker, and Kristin’s companions changed steadily, as people left them and new pilgrims took their place. When she reached Staurin, no one remained from the group she had traveled across the mountain with except the two monks. And in the morning Brother Arngrim came to her, weeping, and said that Brother Torgils had coughed up a great deal of blood in the night; he could not go on. Now they would doubtless arrive in Nidaros too late to see the celebration.