Books: Viking’s Son

GUNNAR’S DAUGHTER—Sigrid Undset— Knopf ($2).

In company with a good many contemporary European novelists, Sigrid Undset has a faculty for making the life of the past appear rich and meaningful in comparison with the involved perplexities of the present. Her three-volume historical romance, Kristin Lavransdatter, pictured a medieval Norway that was brutal and hard, but one in which people fitted into the few simple grooves that society provided and fulfilled their destinies with dramatic symmetry. A prime example of historical fiction, its elaborate documentation artfully grained into the narrative, that book became a best seller (204,000 copies) in the U. S. when it was translated in 1928, helped win Sigrid Undset the Nobel Prize. But only the most loyal of her admirers were likely to struggle through the long, tedious, devout series of novels laid in the 20th Century (The Burning Bush, The Wild Orchid) that followed. Sigrid Undset’s antique figures might come to violent ends, but her unprincipled and purposeless moderns never come to life at all.

Gimnar’s Daughter, one of her first novels, was published in 1909, when Sigrid Undset was 27. A brief, direct story, melodramatic as the folk tales on which it is modeled, it lacks both the involved psychological analyses that weight down her modern fiction, the realistic details that distinguish her historical romances. Since it is laid in the reign of King Olav, when Norway was undergoing the transition from paganism to Christianity, it also reveals Sigrid Undset’s profound religious feeling, is an early expression of the devotion that was eventually to lead her to write thesis novels for the Catholic Church.

A widower, old Gunnar of Vadin had lost his faith in the old pagan gods without accepting the new Christian doctrine that Olav was spreading. In the interim, he “put all his faith in his own strength,” lived to learn that his strength was not great enough. When young Ljot of Iceland arrived at Vadin on a timber-buying expedition, old Gunnar made him welcome, was not adamant when 20-year-old Ljot soon wanted to marry his only daughter. Ljot was a fatherless, headstrong, impulsive Viking. At 13 he had killed his father’s murderer, become widely known both for his deeds and his songs. When he set his heart on Vigdis he refused all counsel of patience, tact, forbearance.

Apparently Icelanders were country bumpkins to sophisticated medieval Norwegians. Without realizing what he was doing, Ljot allied himself with old Gunnar’s enemies, could not visit his sweetheart at Vadin. They poisoned his mind against her. until in the shameful abandon of defeat he made up a song slandering her. Vigdis had been willing to marry him until she heard” it. When she agreed to a last meeting, turned Ljot away forever, he raped her and fled. She bore his child. Gunnar’s enemies taunted him with his disgrace, killed him and burned his house.

Vigdis fled with the baby, fell in with robbers, found protection at Olav’s Christian court. To Ljot she said: “May you have the worst of deaths—and live long and miserably—you and all you hold dear. And may you see your children die most wretchedly before your eyes.”

Ljot returned to Iceland, sobered, shamed, to marry a good, spirited girl he did not love. By the time he had grown to love her his remoteness and indifference had broken her spirit; the death of her children killed her. Ljot became a wanderer. In Scotland he saved the life of Vigdis’ son, won his friendship, returned to Vadin with him. But Vigdis had raised her son to hate his father, insisted that he kill him, demanded that he choose between his parents. When her son said he could not make that choice, Vigdis said it meant he had chosen Ljot. Thereupon Ljot ended his miserable career and dramatized the need for more Christian ethics by picking a fight with his son, getting himself killed.