![]() ![]() From looms and birthing houses, to themes of motherhood and daughterhood, the reader is immersed in the feminine. Kristin Lavransdatter is set squarely within the sphere of women. The story follows the irresistible and impossibly willful character of Kristin through most of her days in fourteenth-century Norway, first as a young girl enjoying bread, butter, dried reindeer, and mead in sunny alpine meadows with her father then through her thrilling first encounters with the love of her life, the beguiling Erlend Nikulausson, during which Undset precisely renders the romantic heart of a teenage girl and finally through Kristin’s adulthood as a brooding but hardworking mistress of a household and mother of many sons. ![]() Undset deftly depicts all the love, ambivalence, anxiety, nostalgia, pain, and spiritual significance of motherhood in Kristin Lavransdatter. Those who have read Kristin Lavransdatter, the epic trilogy by Norwegian Nobel Prize winner Sigrid Undset, name it with satisfaction. If the topic were otherwise-What works from the canon feature meditations on death? Explorations of romantic love? Or even fatherhood?-I am sure my query would yield better results. ![]() A favorite parlor game of mine is to ask literary-minded friends to name important works of fiction which not only have mothers as primary characters, but feature rich explorations of motherhood. ![]()
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