Each year in Norway, thousands of pilgrims visit a statue of a 14th-century woman outside a church in the rural valley she called home. The woman is not a saint or a pioneer, but an ordinary mother—a fictional one, at that. She is Kristin Lavransdatter...
Slate--Kristin Labransdatter statue

I need to be more respectful. The place that she has in the Norwegian psyche is real. And it is fixed and solid as bronze. All my love and tenderest respect to the great people of Norway.