*This post, originally published at 10:04 a.m. has been substantially redone based upon further consideration of two key scenes.
This book has been misconstrued. Written in 1921-22 by a thoroughly modern woman, Sigrid Undset, the Nobel Committee awarded Miss Undset the literature prize in 1928 for this book "principally for her powerful descriptions of Northern life during the Middle Ages." The book is not about that. The setting, 14th century Norway, and the knights-in-shining armor motif, are used as deflections by Miss Undset that she may more conveniently discuss some very contemporary themes, women and sexuality, sexual power, and, it seems to me now, principal among these, rape--consensual and non-consensual sex.
Everybody in this novel is related when you go back just a few generations. They inter-married extensively. It was incestuous. Everyone is married and everyone is unhappy. That is obvious commentary by a modern writer lol.
Marriages were arranged in Medieval Europe and were still into the 20th century. Arranged marriages are in a legal gray area between consent and sexual trafficking.
Kristin was pregnant at 16 and married at 17. Ramborg, her younger sister, was married to a central figure, Simon Darre (Simon Andresson), at 15. Today that is child rape. Willing was Ramborg, but that doesn't get the guy off the hook these days.
Kristin is the modern woman in the novel. She fights male power, by her father Lavrans, by Simon (more on that below). By Erlend Nikulausson, her husband? I'm not sure about that one.Through almost 70% of the book. Erlend punches her on at least two occasions. She is unhappy a lot with Erlend, will verbally zing him, but Erlend really has a hold on Kristin. Simon thinks to himself after Erlend is freed that Erlend "bewitched" Kristin, that was Simon's word for it.
Kristin fought off an attempted rape when she was young. That led indirectly to the murder of her first love, Arne, by the young man who tried to force himself upon her. Arne's mother loudly blames Kristin at the wake. Is there a lesson there? Kristin is extravagantly lusty and is strong-willed, although she settles in to sex-for procreation-only once married. She bears Erlend seven sons. (There is something to both of those: seven and sons only. Yes, I am aware of the seventh-son-of-a-seventh son.)
Kristin is obviously the heroine of the novel but she is no heroine.She is only happy when doing something elicit with Erlend; she can be cruel--only to men, come to think of it, I do not recall an instance of Kristin's signature cruelty, verbal, to another woman. And there is something wrong with Kristin. The only way I can put it is that she will turn every positive situation over in her mind and it comes out negative (below, seminally). It is as if Kristin has some personality disorder. It may be a Norway-centric thing. After the earlier version of this post I posted Jante's Law and as I said in that separate post there is much of the resentful attitude of Jante's Law in Kristin Labransdatter.
Kristin was "given" by her father, Lavrans Lagmandsson, to Simon but she rejected him to follow her loins for Erlend . The Kristin-Simon-Ramborg triangle is...not quite right by modern lights, it would be eye-arching today. Incest is mentioned directly only once in the book so far; I remember alerting to it, it was a charge levied by one person against some other not present but so far the subject has been further dropped. I mention that one instance here because we would say today, not meaning it literally but as a figure of speech, that there is something troublingly "incestuous" about the Kristin-Simon-Ramborg triangle.
Kristin's mother Ragnfrid had one, but a life-long, complaint about Lavrans. I have written about it previously and don't fully understand the contours now any better than I did then but certainly Ragnfrid was not sexually satisfied by Lavrans. She was lusty herself in youth and lost her virginity to some other man--who deceived her with his intentions but the deception did not make the sex, even the memory of it, any less satisfying to Ragnfrid. Ragnfrid wanted to be pursued, wooed, lusted after, seduced, even...?
So consent, non-consent: we see those themes in all of the sub-themes mentioned above--sexual power, female sexual satisfaction, artificial age of consent/statutory rape laws, romantic love sex, procreating-only sex, sex-for-sex' sake lust, arranged marriage, incest, not-quite-but-really-not-cool quasi-incest, seduction, courtship, sexual pursuit, stalking, rape.
Simon Darre (Andresson) is more important a character in the book than the reader would have thought when he disappeared for hundreds of pages.
There are these lulls. There are great spaces in the book where the characters do naught but brood. Kristin on hill tops; Simon on horseback. Since they are never happy, when they think on it they, of course, get more unhappy. Maybe its boredom. They seem to need dangerous frisson--Erlend's reckless life leading to imprisonment, his condemning, or the death of a loved one, commonly a child--to shake them of their ennui.
I have come across two of these lulls already just in Kinship's Dues. The first I believe I have alluded to in a previous post, after Erlend's deliverance, Kristin on a hill top, dissatisfied, agayne, with Erlend; now Simon on horseback, again. Each alone with their thoughts and that is never good.
In between those two lulls was the strangest (a word on that in a moment) section I have yet encountered in the book.
Now the pause: This is a translation, it is the original translation, stuff gets lost in translation. "Strange" and all of its variants is a word that occurs far too frequently in this translation to be natural, as if the translator, Charles Archer, knew 95% of the Norwegian tongue, but not 100% and inexplicably skipped that section of his tutelage wherein it was taught the synonyms of strange. Unpause.
Now to the section that resulted in this changed post. Simon's only son, Andres, becomes grievously ill with fever. Ramborg, the mother, Kristin's sister, is useless. Simon therefore rides off to fetch Kristin to help. There is an odd moment, at least in translation where Simon asks Erlend if it is okay that he take Kristin on this mission of mercy and Erlend does not answer or have time to answer before Simon is helping Kristin mount her house to leave.
For eight days Andres is knocking on death's door, which is well-inclined to give way and allow Andres passage, when Kristin, who has caught a few precious moments of sleep in a chair, awakes and sees Simon kneeling by the bed, head in arms. Thinking it exhaustion Kristin asks if Andres slept peacefully and Simon lifts his tear-stained face and replies that next Andres rests peacefully it will be for eternity. Then the scene occurs and I became dizzy in confusion as to what was dream and what real. Kristin blanches white--her knuckles, her lips. She goes to a drawer and retrieves a piece of linen. What the fuck is this? I had no idea. Simon knew, for he started wide-eyed and exclaimed, No! Kristin. I thought she was going to suffocate the kid, to put him out of his misery. I didn't know what was going on. But Kristin readies herself to leave, on foot, in the middle of the night, to walk miles, to a church--okay church, got it; like she was walking to church to do penance when Simon made his first reappearance on horseback.
"You must order it so that you are here alone when I come back. Stay with him--and when you see me enter, speak no word, and speak no word of this after neither to me nor to any. Not even your priest."
Simon makes vehement attempt to dissuade Kristin but does not physically stop her from going. Is this some allusion to Medieval Norwegian rape mores? If you don't physically fight me off then it's consensual? That was powerful evidence of consent well into the 20th century.To make this scene more inscrutable Kristin says
"I dare.[Pun on Simon's name?] You wot well not one must come nigh us after, before I call [Was this written by Abby Goodnough? What the fuck does that mean? Look up "wot." Who is "us"?]--no one must come nigh us after, nor speak to us, ere he wakes and himself has spoken--"
Now, and here Kristin's power of negative thinking, her positive cruelty, really irritated me:
"But if you would not that I should make trial of this last shift of all--"
He stood...with bowed head, and made no answer. Thereupon she said again--and knew not that a strange, nigh scornful half-smile had come about her white lips:
"Would you that I should not go?"
He turned his head aside, and she went by him...
No, I did not grasp fully the meaning there and bracketed the passage and put a large "?" by it. I was particularly thrown off by "knew not" but Sigrid Undset presently tells us that what Kristin was doing was knowing and it was, in addition to other things, scornful of Simon. How so?
Before "how so?" we have the dream-like segment. It really reads like a nightmare. Kristin is so damned scared to be out alone at night--she is terrified, all but petrified, but she races by her fear with each sure, determined step. There is danger sensed in every leaf blown into her, in every stone that tumbles, these inanimate objects take animate form in her mind as demons and ghosts. She "dares not" stop, even pause, and will not look behind her. It was dream-like and I genuinely did not know what was dream, when she sat napping in the chair, and what was real.
She is gone all night and so, unfortunately, has time to think.
How so:
This child she would save...(original emphasis)
For you too, Simon Darre, when the dearest thing you owned on earth was the stake, took at my hands more than a man may take with honour unabated--(emphasis added)
See? The vaguely allusive rape thing again. What the fuck is this crazy Medieval Norwegian woman talking to herself about now?
"Would you that I should not go--?", she repeats to herself what she said to Simon.
And he had not been man enough to answer.
I got really irritated, pissed that she debased this heroic act on her part and made of it a tool to hold over Simon's head.
...she had swooped down upon that single hour when she found him at the breaking point--had seized the chance...This secret now she would share with him--that he knew she too had seen him in an hour when he stood not firmly on his feet--
Power. "Swooped down," like a bird of prey, like a stalker, when she saw her prey weakened; on the streets when you kill a man, in a drug deal, for instance, who should have seen it coming but was insouciant, the term is the victim was "slipping," he let his guard down. And Kristin "seized the chance"--that's what a rapist, or a murderer, does!
For he had come to know her too nearly. (emphasis added) For he had come to know her too dearly for he had come to know her too dearly (?)
...
Simon had forced [circle "forced", rape allusive] her to understand at the last that he was the strongest--stronger than she herself and stronger than the man she had chosen to give herself to. She must indeed have felt it...in that shameful den in Oslo--that this lumpish,,round-cheeked, talking youth was stronger than--
So went she there [to the Oslo bawdy house]...and took upon herself this sin, that she might win--was it revenge?--revenge for that she had been forced ["forced" again] to see he was worthier than they two--?
I knew that Kristin had warped the Oslo incident out of chronological order so I deconstructed it to identify the precise point.
Deconstruction:
1) went she there
2) to fuck Erlend, commit "this sin"
3) with purpose to ("that she might")
4) get something on ("was it revenge?") Simon.
There it was.That is fatally flawed chronologically. Simon did not know that Kristin was there with Erlend beforehand, only afterwards.
5) because she had been "forced"--Nobody forced Kristin. That is some personality disorder at work.
6) to see that Simon was better than she and Erlend. Simon, betrothed to Kristin at this moment, showed up at the whorehouse armed, he and Erlend had words and almost fought but because Simon was the more honorable. Erlend stood down. Simon was the more honorable, and Kristin so concluded. In Kristin's warped mind "she had been forced to see that Simon was worthier" than both Kristin and Erlend.
I then wrote in the original post a judgment on this matter:
Fuck Kristin Labransdatter and the road she trods. What a fucking bitch (apologies, AOC). Kristin Labransdatter, to love another more than "one's own being," yourself, is not saying much in your case, do you understand that? You hate yourself, you hate life, you hate those who try to help you and make you hate yourself and your life less. You have never loved, Kristin, you have only lusted, as you admit a few pages on from here. Never do you see kindness in others for kindness' sake, never do you offer kindness but that it is a power tool. When Kristin Labransdatter is in most peril, woe be to him who is nearby and snatches her from oblivion for he now has something on her, he has seen her weak and has deigned to help a friend in need. A friend in need is not a friend indeed to Kristin Labransdatter. The helping friend has seen Kristin weak, has revealed himself to be her superior and Kristin Labransdatter will not have that. She waits like a vulture or rapist for a similar weakness in her rescuer and then "swoops down" on him. He incurs a debt, you see. Kristin Labransdatter has bestowed upon him her peril as an obligation that he must show weakness so that she can rescue him and restore the balance of power. She "was forced" (by whom? It matters not to Kristin.) to see Simon as superior to both she and Erlend. He who rescues her thereby incurs the obligation to be himself in peril, weak, so that Kristin can "get even," be the strong one and rescue him. That is the most goddamned fucked up philosophy of life I have ever heard of. And the moral of this story is, if Kristin Labransdatter, or any Norwegian, or any of the Northern countries, were outside my condo door right now, on fire, screaming and writhing in pain as the flames consume her, I would not so much as open the door to piss on Kristin to put the flames out.
That was the judgment that I wrote at 10:04 a.m. and then had the epiphany which caused me to re-write:
So it's fucked up, Kristin's whole thinking on this is fucked up, it's illogical and unchronological...Wait...Oh my God...I see now...
Sigrid Undset is here consciously playing a literary fugue, the same notes as in the Oslo bawdy house but inverted and in different order. That is why this is out of order! Reading this closely now Simon came not to salvage his honor but that of Lavrans, Kristin's father. Simon rode away with Kristin and made her promise that she would never tell Lavrans about this (a promise she broke) just as Kristin is now making Simon promise "speak no word, and speak no word of this after neither to me nor to any. Not even your priest."
But now you too know it, Simon--when 'tis for the life of him one loves more than one's own being--a poor human soul will grasp at aught, at aught--
But wait, the nightmare gets more macabre. Kristin reaches the church, I'm thinking to pray, right? WRONG, she goes into the cemetery and digs down into the grave of "Bjarne," who the fuck Bjarne is I do not know, it is not Bjarne of the meeting with the King, I googled the book with Bjarne, got the Wikipedia list of characters and Bjarne-of-the-King-meeting was the only entry...Oh, I think this Bjarne-of-the-cemetery must be one of Lavrans and Ragnfrid's sons who died in infancy, for Kristin leaves a family ring and comes away with "the turf." What fucking turf? Any fucking turf? Or was it special turf over Bjarne's body. I don't know. Anyway, she digs down, cuts roots with a knife she has with her, leaves the ring, takes up "the turf", wraps it in the linen cloth and heads back to Simon's sick house. Some Norwegian folk cure.
Again on the way back she is tormented by the ghost of Arne, her childhood sweetheart, of more leaves and inanimate objects coming for her; again she is too frightened to look back.
Back at the death watch Kristin lays the turf wrapped in the linen on little Andres' face and immediately Andres stirs! He brushes the thing off his face reproachfully. Kristin bends over the child and feels his breath come on her face. She sits back in the chair to monitor. She thinks.
Even if 'twere true that she had done this out of her need to set herself right in Simon's eyes--to show him that she too was willing to do more than take gifts at his hands: a need had been in her to dare all that she might requite him.
The next morning Andres is cured.
"Simon, wake up!...Andres is calling on his father; hear you not?--'twas the first word he spoke--" Her face shown with smiles, while the tears ran down...
...
his face lit up with smiles when he saw his father...
He speaks! He calls for his father. Andres is SAVED. By Kristin, by grave robbing of her own dead brother, by unimaginable sin, for a selfish, warped purpose, but Andres is saved and on the road to recovery.
Alright then. Good night. Kristin Labransdatter: don't ever come near me.
This book has been misconstrued. Written in 1921-22 by a thoroughly modern woman, Sigrid Undset, the Nobel Committee awarded Miss Undset the literature prize in 1928 for this book "principally for her powerful descriptions of Northern life during the Middle Ages." The book is not about that. The setting, 14th century Norway, and the knights-in-shining armor motif, are used as deflections by Miss Undset that she may more conveniently discuss some very contemporary themes, women and sexuality, sexual power, and, it seems to me now, principal among these, rape--consensual and non-consensual sex.
Everybody in this novel is related when you go back just a few generations. They inter-married extensively. It was incestuous. Everyone is married and everyone is unhappy. That is obvious commentary by a modern writer lol.
Marriages were arranged in Medieval Europe and were still into the 20th century. Arranged marriages are in a legal gray area between consent and sexual trafficking.
Kristin was pregnant at 16 and married at 17. Ramborg, her younger sister, was married to a central figure, Simon Darre (Simon Andresson), at 15. Today that is child rape. Willing was Ramborg, but that doesn't get the guy off the hook these days.
Kristin is the modern woman in the novel. She fights male power, by her father Lavrans, by Simon (more on that below). By Erlend Nikulausson, her husband? I'm not sure about that one.Through almost 70% of the book. Erlend punches her on at least two occasions. She is unhappy a lot with Erlend, will verbally zing him, but Erlend really has a hold on Kristin. Simon thinks to himself after Erlend is freed that Erlend "bewitched" Kristin, that was Simon's word for it.
Kristin fought off an attempted rape when she was young. That led indirectly to the murder of her first love, Arne, by the young man who tried to force himself upon her. Arne's mother loudly blames Kristin at the wake. Is there a lesson there? Kristin is extravagantly lusty and is strong-willed, although she settles in to sex-for procreation-only once married. She bears Erlend seven sons. (There is something to both of those: seven and sons only. Yes, I am aware of the seventh-son-of-a-seventh son.)
Kristin is obviously the heroine of the novel but she is no heroine.She is only happy when doing something elicit with Erlend; she can be cruel--only to men, come to think of it, I do not recall an instance of Kristin's signature cruelty, verbal, to another woman. And there is something wrong with Kristin. The only way I can put it is that she will turn every positive situation over in her mind and it comes out negative (below, seminally). It is as if Kristin has some personality disorder. It may be a Norway-centric thing. After the earlier version of this post I posted Jante's Law and as I said in that separate post there is much of the resentful attitude of Jante's Law in Kristin Labransdatter.
Kristin was "given" by her father, Lavrans Lagmandsson, to Simon but she rejected him to follow her loins for Erlend . The Kristin-Simon-Ramborg triangle is...not quite right by modern lights, it would be eye-arching today. Incest is mentioned directly only once in the book so far; I remember alerting to it, it was a charge levied by one person against some other not present but so far the subject has been further dropped. I mention that one instance here because we would say today, not meaning it literally but as a figure of speech, that there is something troublingly "incestuous" about the Kristin-Simon-Ramborg triangle.
Kristin's mother Ragnfrid had one, but a life-long, complaint about Lavrans. I have written about it previously and don't fully understand the contours now any better than I did then but certainly Ragnfrid was not sexually satisfied by Lavrans. She was lusty herself in youth and lost her virginity to some other man--who deceived her with his intentions but the deception did not make the sex, even the memory of it, any less satisfying to Ragnfrid. Ragnfrid wanted to be pursued, wooed, lusted after, seduced, even...?
So consent, non-consent: we see those themes in all of the sub-themes mentioned above--sexual power, female sexual satisfaction, artificial age of consent/statutory rape laws, romantic love sex, procreating-only sex, sex-for-sex' sake lust, arranged marriage, incest, not-quite-but-really-not-cool quasi-incest, seduction, courtship, sexual pursuit, stalking, rape.
Simon Darre (Andresson) is more important a character in the book than the reader would have thought when he disappeared for hundreds of pages.
There are these lulls. There are great spaces in the book where the characters do naught but brood. Kristin on hill tops; Simon on horseback. Since they are never happy, when they think on it they, of course, get more unhappy. Maybe its boredom. They seem to need dangerous frisson--Erlend's reckless life leading to imprisonment, his condemning, or the death of a loved one, commonly a child--to shake them of their ennui.
I have come across two of these lulls already just in Kinship's Dues. The first I believe I have alluded to in a previous post, after Erlend's deliverance, Kristin on a hill top, dissatisfied, agayne, with Erlend; now Simon on horseback, again. Each alone with their thoughts and that is never good.
In between those two lulls was the strangest (a word on that in a moment) section I have yet encountered in the book.
Now the pause: This is a translation, it is the original translation, stuff gets lost in translation. "Strange" and all of its variants is a word that occurs far too frequently in this translation to be natural, as if the translator, Charles Archer, knew 95% of the Norwegian tongue, but not 100% and inexplicably skipped that section of his tutelage wherein it was taught the synonyms of strange. Unpause.
Now to the section that resulted in this changed post. Simon's only son, Andres, becomes grievously ill with fever. Ramborg, the mother, Kristin's sister, is useless. Simon therefore rides off to fetch Kristin to help. There is an odd moment, at least in translation where Simon asks Erlend if it is okay that he take Kristin on this mission of mercy and Erlend does not answer or have time to answer before Simon is helping Kristin mount her house to leave.
For eight days Andres is knocking on death's door, which is well-inclined to give way and allow Andres passage, when Kristin, who has caught a few precious moments of sleep in a chair, awakes and sees Simon kneeling by the bed, head in arms. Thinking it exhaustion Kristin asks if Andres slept peacefully and Simon lifts his tear-stained face and replies that next Andres rests peacefully it will be for eternity. Then the scene occurs and I became dizzy in confusion as to what was dream and what real. Kristin blanches white--her knuckles, her lips. She goes to a drawer and retrieves a piece of linen. What the fuck is this? I had no idea. Simon knew, for he started wide-eyed and exclaimed, No! Kristin. I thought she was going to suffocate the kid, to put him out of his misery. I didn't know what was going on. But Kristin readies herself to leave, on foot, in the middle of the night, to walk miles, to a church--okay church, got it; like she was walking to church to do penance when Simon made his first reappearance on horseback.
"You must order it so that you are here alone when I come back. Stay with him--and when you see me enter, speak no word, and speak no word of this after neither to me nor to any. Not even your priest."
Simon makes vehement attempt to dissuade Kristin but does not physically stop her from going. Is this some allusion to Medieval Norwegian rape mores? If you don't physically fight me off then it's consensual? That was powerful evidence of consent well into the 20th century.To make this scene more inscrutable Kristin says
"I dare.[Pun on Simon's name?] You wot well not one must come nigh us after, before I call [Was this written by Abby Goodnough? What the fuck does that mean? Look up "wot." Who is "us"?]--no one must come nigh us after, nor speak to us, ere he wakes and himself has spoken--"
Now, and here Kristin's power of negative thinking, her positive cruelty, really irritated me:
"But if you would not that I should make trial of this last shift of all--"
He stood...with bowed head, and made no answer. Thereupon she said again--and knew not that a strange, nigh scornful half-smile had come about her white lips:
"Would you that I should not go?"
He turned his head aside, and she went by him...
No, I did not grasp fully the meaning there and bracketed the passage and put a large "?" by it. I was particularly thrown off by "knew not" but Sigrid Undset presently tells us that what Kristin was doing was knowing and it was, in addition to other things, scornful of Simon. How so?
Before "how so?" we have the dream-like segment. It really reads like a nightmare. Kristin is so damned scared to be out alone at night--she is terrified, all but petrified, but she races by her fear with each sure, determined step. There is danger sensed in every leaf blown into her, in every stone that tumbles, these inanimate objects take animate form in her mind as demons and ghosts. She "dares not" stop, even pause, and will not look behind her. It was dream-like and I genuinely did not know what was dream, when she sat napping in the chair, and what was real.
She is gone all night and so, unfortunately, has time to think.
How so:
This child she would save...(original emphasis)
For you too, Simon Darre, when the dearest thing you owned on earth was the stake, took at my hands more than a man may take with honour unabated--(emphasis added)
See? The vaguely allusive rape thing again. What the fuck is this crazy Medieval Norwegian woman talking to herself about now?
"Would you that I should not go--?", she repeats to herself what she said to Simon.
And he had not been man enough to answer.
I got really irritated, pissed that she debased this heroic act on her part and made of it a tool to hold over Simon's head.
...she had swooped down upon that single hour when she found him at the breaking point--had seized the chance...This secret now she would share with him--that he knew she too had seen him in an hour when he stood not firmly on his feet--
Power. "Swooped down," like a bird of prey, like a stalker, when she saw her prey weakened; on the streets when you kill a man, in a drug deal, for instance, who should have seen it coming but was insouciant, the term is the victim was "slipping," he let his guard down. And Kristin "seized the chance"--that's what a rapist, or a murderer, does!
For he had come to know her too nearly. (emphasis added) For he had come to know her too dearly for he had come to know her too dearly (?)
...
Simon had forced [circle "forced", rape allusive] her to understand at the last that he was the strongest--stronger than she herself and stronger than the man she had chosen to give herself to. She must indeed have felt it...in that shameful den in Oslo--that this lumpish,,round-cheeked, talking youth was stronger than--
So went she there [to the Oslo bawdy house]...and took upon herself this sin, that she might win--was it revenge?--revenge for that she had been forced ["forced" again] to see he was worthier than they two--?
I knew that Kristin had warped the Oslo incident out of chronological order so I deconstructed it to identify the precise point.
Deconstruction:
1) went she there
2) to fuck Erlend, commit "this sin"
3) with purpose to ("that she might")
4) get something on ("was it revenge?") Simon.
There it was.That is fatally flawed chronologically. Simon did not know that Kristin was there with Erlend beforehand, only afterwards.
5) because she had been "forced"--Nobody forced Kristin. That is some personality disorder at work.
6) to see that Simon was better than she and Erlend. Simon, betrothed to Kristin at this moment, showed up at the whorehouse armed, he and Erlend had words and almost fought but because Simon was the more honorable. Erlend stood down. Simon was the more honorable, and Kristin so concluded. In Kristin's warped mind "she had been forced to see that Simon was worthier" than both Kristin and Erlend.
I then wrote in the original post a judgment on this matter:
Fuck Kristin Labransdatter and the road she trods. What a fucking bitch (apologies, AOC). Kristin Labransdatter, to love another more than "one's own being," yourself, is not saying much in your case, do you understand that? You hate yourself, you hate life, you hate those who try to help you and make you hate yourself and your life less. You have never loved, Kristin, you have only lusted, as you admit a few pages on from here. Never do you see kindness in others for kindness' sake, never do you offer kindness but that it is a power tool. When Kristin Labransdatter is in most peril, woe be to him who is nearby and snatches her from oblivion for he now has something on her, he has seen her weak and has deigned to help a friend in need. A friend in need is not a friend indeed to Kristin Labransdatter. The helping friend has seen Kristin weak, has revealed himself to be her superior and Kristin Labransdatter will not have that. She waits like a vulture or rapist for a similar weakness in her rescuer and then "swoops down" on him. He incurs a debt, you see. Kristin Labransdatter has bestowed upon him her peril as an obligation that he must show weakness so that she can rescue him and restore the balance of power. She "was forced" (by whom? It matters not to Kristin.) to see Simon as superior to both she and Erlend. He who rescues her thereby incurs the obligation to be himself in peril, weak, so that Kristin can "get even," be the strong one and rescue him. That is the most goddamned fucked up philosophy of life I have ever heard of. And the moral of this story is, if Kristin Labransdatter, or any Norwegian, or any of the Northern countries, were outside my condo door right now, on fire, screaming and writhing in pain as the flames consume her, I would not so much as open the door to piss on Kristin to put the flames out.
That was the judgment that I wrote at 10:04 a.m. and then had the epiphany which caused me to re-write:
So it's fucked up, Kristin's whole thinking on this is fucked up, it's illogical and unchronological...Wait...Oh my God...I see now...
Sigrid Undset is here consciously playing a literary fugue, the same notes as in the Oslo bawdy house but inverted and in different order. That is why this is out of order! Reading this closely now Simon came not to salvage his honor but that of Lavrans, Kristin's father. Simon rode away with Kristin and made her promise that she would never tell Lavrans about this (a promise she broke) just as Kristin is now making Simon promise "speak no word, and speak no word of this after neither to me nor to any. Not even your priest."
But now you too know it, Simon--when 'tis for the life of him one loves more than one's own being--a poor human soul will grasp at aught, at aught--
But wait, the nightmare gets more macabre. Kristin reaches the church, I'm thinking to pray, right? WRONG, she goes into the cemetery and digs down into the grave of "Bjarne," who the fuck Bjarne is I do not know, it is not Bjarne of the meeting with the King, I googled the book with Bjarne, got the Wikipedia list of characters and Bjarne-of-the-King-meeting was the only entry...Oh, I think this Bjarne-of-the-cemetery must be one of Lavrans and Ragnfrid's sons who died in infancy, for Kristin leaves a family ring and comes away with "the turf." What fucking turf? Any fucking turf? Or was it special turf over Bjarne's body. I don't know. Anyway, she digs down, cuts roots with a knife she has with her, leaves the ring, takes up "the turf", wraps it in the linen cloth and heads back to Simon's sick house. Some Norwegian folk cure.
Again on the way back she is tormented by the ghost of Arne, her childhood sweetheart, of more leaves and inanimate objects coming for her; again she is too frightened to look back.
Back at the death watch Kristin lays the turf wrapped in the linen on little Andres' face and immediately Andres stirs! He brushes the thing off his face reproachfully. Kristin bends over the child and feels his breath come on her face. She sits back in the chair to monitor. She thinks.
Even if 'twere true that she had done this out of her need to set herself right in Simon's eyes--to show him that she too was willing to do more than take gifts at his hands: a need had been in her to dare all that she might requite him.
The next morning Andres is cured.
"Simon, wake up!...Andres is calling on his father; hear you not?--'twas the first word he spoke--" Her face shown with smiles, while the tears ran down...
...
his face lit up with smiles when he saw his father...
He speaks! He calls for his father. Andres is SAVED. By Kristin, by grave robbing of her own dead brother, by unimaginable sin, for a selfish, warped purpose, but Andres is saved and on the road to recovery.
Alright then. Good night. Kristin Labransdatter: don't ever come near me.
