Free Will, Even in The Snake Pit

I’m starting to think there may be a good reason Sigrid Undset (left) won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1928. She did so largely on the strength of seven novels about Norway in the 13th and 14th centuries. Three of the novels form the trilogy Kristin Lavransdatter; the other four are a tetralogy titled The Master of Hestviken. Blown away by Kristin two years ago, I am now halfway through Master, and I can’t put it down. Having read The Axe and now The Snake Pit, I am afraid I will have to renege on my promise to Marian to read the next book in our father-daughter book club, at least until I have finished the last two books in the Master tetralogy, In the Wilderness and The Son Avenger.

Kristin Lavransdatter takes place in the first half of the 14th century, a half-century that culminated in the Black Death. The Master of Hestviken, written after Kristin, unfolds earlier—at the end of the 13th century, a time when the old pagan ways were encountering new Catholic ones brought to Scandinavia by wandering friars. The Church was evolving, its power ebbing and flowing. In the early 13th century, Norwegian priests could marry. By the end of the century, they embraced celibacy. This results in one odd pair of characters: a married priest and his son, a celibate priest.

Undset (1882–1849) was as unabashedly Catholic a novelist as today’s Michael O’Brien (born a year before Undset died). But because she writes about a pre-Reformation period in which Catholicism was powerful and virtually ubiquitous—the moral water in which people swam—she can, as it were, take it for granted, and her reader can too. The faith does not seem imposed on us as it does by O’Brien, whose protagonists live mostly in the 20th century. Where O’Brien may seem to preach, Undset merely tells. And the voice in which she speaks never makes all-knowing value judgments. Her narratives unfold as though told around the hearth by neighbors recalling recent events.

Another difference between Undset and O’Brien is family. While family is the driver of most great novels, as it is of life, family in Undset’s medieval Norway is a moral system more powerful and central than faith itself. Catholicism is new to 13th century Norway; family is age-old. And the moral lapses made by Undset’s main characters—and they’re all sinners—are, first and foremost, violations of family. You know the big items on the list: premarital sex and adultery, with murder and the threat of infanticide always lurking.

With the traditional family on the verge of being blown up by our culture, you might think writing about premarital sex, adultery, and their consequences would make Undset passé, irrelevant. But here’s her genius: she describes so vividly the twists and turns of the human conscience under the weight of sin that the reader simply cannot look away. Sin is real, and so are its consequences. Undset’s stories look so deep into the human heart that anyone—Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, atheist—can recognize himself in Olav Audunsson, herself in Kristin Lavransdatter.

In the Master series, the sins multiply for Olav and his wife, Ingunn Steinfinnsdatter, together and separately, and the consequences provide all of the drama of The Snake Pit. Through the worst possible moral nightmares, however, Olav retains an awareness of the possibility of redemption. That awareness is brilliantly highlighted in a paragraph near the end of the book:

So many a time had [Olav] allowed himself to be driven out of his road, upon false tracks that he had no desire to follow. Long ago he had acknowledged the truth of Bishop Torfinn’s words: the man who is bent upon doing his own will shall surely see the day when he finds he has done that which he never willed. But he perceived that this kind of will was but a random shot, an arrow sent at a venture.—He still had his own inmost will, however, and it was as a sword. When he was called to Christianity, he had been given this free will, as the chieftain gives his man a sword when he makes him a knight. If he had shot away all his other weapons, marred them by ill use—this right to choose whether he would follow God or forsake Him remained a trusty blade, and his Lord would never strike it out of his hand. Though his faith and honour as a Christian were now stained like the misused sword of a traitor knight, God had not taken it from him; he might bear it still in the company of our Lord’s enemies, or restore it kneeling to that Lord, who yet was ready to raise him to His bosom, greet him with the kiss of peace, and give him back his sword, cleansed and blessed.

I’m tired now and will break off here, but I am probably going to write much more on these books in the coming weeks, so if you do not find this stuff interesting, you might want to tune in after Christmas.

Fair warning.