The other sons go their ways, except for Gaute, the third born, who is now manager of Jorundgaard. As the years pass, he, who is most like Kristin's father, Lavrans, shows himself to be a good guardian of the estate. His two older brothers, Nikulaus and Bjorgulf, have gone to a monastery, and given up their claim to the land. When Gaute brings home a woman whom he will make his wife, Kristin agrees to turn over the running of the household to her new daughter-in-law.
After the first child is born, the tensions between old mistress and new make it clear to Kristin that she must move on. She is not embittered by her situation, realizing that the young people need the opportunity to have their turn at life, but her departure is a very poignant moment for all of them. She goes to a convent near the monastery where her oldest sons are novices, and lives there as a lay sister, intending eventually to take the vows. The year is 1349, the year of the Black Plague. In 1350, the plague reaches Norway. Kristin puts her medical skills to use, but nothing can stop the spread of the disease. Having cared for others, heedless of her own well-being, she finally succumbs to the Black Death herself.
To say that these are great books is pathetically inadequate. Herewith, a passage that shows better than any outside comment can indicate, the depth and pertinence of this tale. Kristin's grown son, Ivar, has offered her a home with him, now that she has given over her role at Jorundgaard to her daughter-in-law.
"Kristin sat with her little grandson in her lap, and thought that it would not be easy for her at either place. It was a hard matter, growing old. It seemed that she herself was the young woman, just lately... Now she had drifted into a backwater. And not long ago her own sons had been like this child on her knee... Recently, the thought of her own mother rose often in her mind — her mother that she could only remember as an ageing, heavy-hearted woman. Yet she had been young, once; she, too, lay and warmed her baby girl with her body's warmth. Her mother too had been marked in youth, body and soul, by the bearing and nourishing of children; and she had thought perchance no more than Kristin herself, when she sat with that sweet young life at her breast, that so long as they two lived, each single day would lead the child farther and farther from her arms.
"'When you yourself had borne a child, Kristin, I thought you would understand,' her mother had said once. Now, she understood that her mother's heart had been scored deep with memories of her daughter, memories of thoughts for her child from the time it was unborn and from all the years a child remembers nothing of, memories of fear and hope and dreams that children never know have been dreamed for them, until their own time comes to fear and hope and dream in secret — "
Notes about the books
Vol. I: The Wreath, 297 pp
Vol. II: The Mistress of Husaby (also known as The Wife), 403 pp
Vol. III: The Cross, 424 pp
Originally published in Norwegian in 1920, US copyright 1925, by Alfred A. Knopf.
My bookstore had The Wreath only in the 1997 edition. The other two volumes reviewed here were from a 1987 edition by Vintage Books, translated by Charles Archer. We strongly recommend the '97 Penguin edition translated by Tiina Nunnally for the smoothness of the translation. The Archer version is filled with archaic language (t'was and t'were and "sooth," for example) and awkward grammar that is possibly a too-literal translation of Norwegian construction. A quick search shows that the Nunnally version exists in all three volumes, and we recommend that you search it out.
