But in the book’s first section, Lavrans takes her up to the mountain pastures with a handful of children and servants to see to some land-management tasks. Lavrans is a salt-of-the-earth Norwegian, “a strong and courageous man, but a peaceful soul, honest and calm, humble in conduct but courtly in bearing, a remarkably capable farmer and a great hunter.” As the treasured offspring of this strong and good man, Kristin is herself strong and good, and destined to carry on her family’s legacy of virtue. The story follows Kristin, daughter of Lavrans, from childhood to death.

(I cheated a little and stewed it.) Photo: Erica MacLean. Not accidentally, Undset was writing in the 1920s, another time of rapid social change.īeef brisket, ready to be “boiled” like they did in the Middle Ages.

The epic’s structural and textual allusions are so numerous that, as the professor Sherrill Harbison dryly remarks in her introduction to The Cross, they “show no signs of being exhausted by scholars.” (She also-correctly, I feel-thinks the book is overlooked.) When writing Kristin Lavransdatter, Undset drew from sagas, ballads, Scandinavian oral tradition, and medieval texts of all types, notably the allegory Le roman de la rose, to tell the tale of a woman in the early fourteenth century, a time when society was changing for women, who takes her newish right to consent to her own marriage a step further and demands her own choice of husband. It’s also a gripping read and an impressive feat of historical re-creation, which helped Undset win the 1928 Nobel Prize in Literature. Kristin Lavransdatter, which unfolds over the course of three volumes- The Wreath, The Wife, and The Cross-is a woman’s story. I was miserable, and perfecting the oatmeal made me feel better. I’d never thought being a woman mattered much, but suddenly it seemed to. Childless people found my travails boring and embarrassing. My husband was unhelpful with the children.

I had a two-year-old daughter, an infant son, and an office job, to which I fled every day in great relief to get a moment to myself and then struggled not to leak breast milk on my work clothes. I tried different combinations of milk and water.

I blitzed half the oats in the baby-food blender before cooking. Mine, on the other hand, were ridiculous. The porridges in Undset’s book are good and nourishing but plain (though in one scene, a young Kristin eats hers with “thick cream” off her father’s spoon). The most common food in the medieval historical romance Kristin Lavransdatter, written by the Norwegian author Sigrid Undset (1882–1949), is oatmeal porridge, a dish I made elaborate perfection of during my children’s early years.

The Cross by Sigrid Undset