SIGRID UNDSET

 

Although her father was Norwegian, SIGRID UNDSET was born in 1882 in the small town of Kalundborg in  Denmark, at the childhood home of her mother, Charlotte.  She was the eldest of three daughters. She and her family moved to Norway when she was two.

She grew up in the Norwegian capital, Oslo (or Kristiania, as it was known until 1925). When she was only 11 years old, her father, the Norwegian archaeologist Ingvald Martin Undset,  died at the age of 40 after a long illness.

The family's economic situation meant that Undset had to give up hope of a university education and after a one-year secretarial course she obtained work at the age of 16 as a secretary with an engineering company in Kristiania, a post she was to hold for 10 years.

 While employed at office work, Sigrid wrote and studied. She was 16 years old when she made her first attempt at writing a novel set in the Nordic Middle Ages. At the age of 25, she made her literary debut with a short realistic novel on adultery. It created a stir, and she found herself ranked as a promising young author in Norway. 

During the years up to 1919, she published a number of novels set in contemporary Kristiania, about the city and its inhabitants. They are stories of working people, of trivial family destinies, of the relationship between parents and children. 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).

Her books sold well from the start, and, after the publication of her third book, she left her 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. In Rome, she met Anders Castus Svarstad, a Norwegian painter, whom she married almost three years later. She was 30 and he was thirteen years older, married, and had a wife and three children in Norway. It was nearly three years before Anders got his divorce from his first wife.

Sigrid and Anders were married in 1912 and went to stay in London for six months. From London, they returned to Rome, where their first child, a boy named after his father, was born in January 1913. In the years up to 1919, she had another child, and the household also took in Ander's three children from his first marriage. These were difficult years: her second child, a girl, was mentally handicapped, as was one of Ander's sons by his first wife.

She continued writing, finishing her last realistic novels and collections of short stories. She also entered the public arena 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 Gudbrand Valley in southeast Norway, taking her two children with her. She was then expecting her third child. The intention was that she should take a rest at Lillehammer and move back to Kristiania as soon as Anders had their new house in order. However, the marriage broke down and a divorce followed. In August 1919, she gave birth to her third child, at Lillehammer. She decided to make Lillehammer her home, and within two years, Bjerkebæk, a large house of traditional Norwegian timber architecture, was completed, along with a large fenced garden with views of the town and the villages around. Here she was able to retreat and concentrate on her writing. 

 After the birth of her third child, and with a secure roof over her head, Sigrid started what was to become her most beloved work, Kristin Lavransdatter.  She had studied Old Norse manuscripts and chronicles and visited and examined Medieval churches and monasteries, both at home and abroad. She was now an authority on the period she was portraying and a very different person from the 22-year-old who had written her first novel about the Middle Ages.

Both Sigrid's parents were atheists and, although, in accord with the norm of the day, she and her two younger sisters were baptized and with their mother regularly attended the local Lutheran church, the milieu in which they were raised was a thoroughly secular one. Sigrid spent much of her life as an agnostic, but marriage and the outbreak of the First World War 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 skepticism, with a painful uneasiness about the ethical decline of the age, towards Christianity.

Beginning around 1917, Sigrid developed a passionate interest in the writings of Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson, many of whose writings she was to translate into Norwegian.  She was received into the Catholic Church in November 1924, after thorough instruction from the Catholic priest in her local parish. She was 42 years old. She subsequently became a Third Order Dominican.

In Norway, her 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. The attacks against her faith and character were quite vicious at times, with the result that her  literary gifts were aroused in response.

In all her writing, she shows 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.

For many years, she participated in the public debate, going out of her way to introduce the ongoing Catholic literary revival into Norwegian literature. In response, she was swiftly dubbed "The Mistress of Bjerkebæk" and "The Catholic Lady".

Sigrid's essays about Elizabethan era English Catholic martyrs Margaret Clitherow and Robert Southwell were collected and published in Stages on the Road. Her Saga of Saints told the whole of Norwegian history through the lives of Norwegian Saints.

In May 1928, she travelled to England and visited G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, both of whose writings she was later to translate into Norwegian.  

Sigrid won the 1928 Nobel Prize in Literature, "principally for her powerful descriptions of Northern life during the Middle Ages". At that time she was translating Catholic books into Norwegian, including works by Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson and G.K. Chesterton. She donated the money she received from the Nobel Committee to families who were raising mentally disabled children. 

When Germany invaded Norway in April 1940, Sigrid was forced to flee as she had strongly criticized both Nazi ideology and Adolf Hitler since the early 1930s. Her books were banned in Nazi Germany and she  knew her name was on a list of those to be rounded up in the first wave of arrests. Not wishing to become a target of the Gestapo. She  fled to neutral Sweden.

Her eldest son, Norwegian Army Second Lieutenant Anders Svarstad, was killed in action at the age of 27, in April 1940, while defending Segalstad Bridge in Gausdal from German troops.

Her sick daughter had died shortly before the outbreak of the war. Bjerkebæk was requisitioned by the Wehrmacht, and used as officers' quarters throughout the Occupation of Norway.

Her library had already been secretly divided between her closest local friends. The books were hidden at great risk throughout the Nazi occupation and were returned to her after the Liberation of Norway.

In 1940, Sigrid and her younger son left neutral Sweden then crossed the Soviet Union via the Trans-Siberian Railroad before arriving as a political refugee in the United States. There, she untiringly pleaded occupied Norway's cause and the plight of European Jews in writings, speeches and interviews. She lived in Brooklyn Heights, New York where she was active in 

St. Ansgar's Scandinavian Catholic League, writing several articles for its bulletin. She also traveled to Florida, where she became a close friend of novelist Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings authorof  The Yearling, which won the Pulitzer Prize.

 Sigrid returned to Norway after the liberation in 1945. She lived another four years but never published another word, dying at the age of67 in Lillehamer. She was buried in the village of Mesnali, 15 kilometers east of Lillehammer, where her daughter and the son who died in battle are remembered. The grave is recognizable by three black crosses.