She has an idyllic childhood, and is much loved by her father, Lavrans. In The Bridal Wreath, the first volume, we first meet the rebellous, willful heroine. (Yes, pre-marital sex was a sin, particularly because Kristin was already betrothed to someone else, and Erlend had lived with a married woman for 10 years and had two children). And as life goes on, Kristin becomes aware that her greatest sin, pre-marital sex with the handsome older slacker, Erlend, has shaped her unhappiness and the fates of her sons. These gorgeously-written novels, T he Bridal Wreath, The Mistress of Husaby, and The Cross, chronicle the life of a medieval woman and her experience of love: filial love, intense friendship, passionate first love, sex, a tumultuous marriage, maternal love, charity, religion, and spiritual love. As I get older, this is particularly true with the last volume, The Cross. There is no separation of myself from the text. And even now, decades after my first read, I fall into the book and become Kristin, the heroine. Unset is a brilliant storyteller, and every sentence shines with pictorial detail and psychological insights. It took me a year to reread this stunning trilogy, set in fourteenth-century Norway. I recently finished The Cross, the third volume of Nobel Prize winner Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter. Charles Archer’s translation of Kristin Lavransdatter.
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