Kristin Lavransdatter

by Sigrid Undset

Andrea Hedberg, a friend who shared Undset’s literary interests and ambitions. The correspondence, which lasted more than forty

Hedberg

Lavrans belonged to a lineage that here in Norway was known as the sons of Lagmand. It originated in Sweden with a certain Laurentius Östgötelagman, who abducted the Earl of Bjelbo’s sister, the maiden Bengta, from Vreta cloister and fled to Norway with her. Herr Laurentius served King Haakon the Old, and was much favored by him; the king bestowed on him the manor Skog. But after he had been in this country for eight years, he died of a lingering disease, and his widow, a daughter of the house of the Folkungs whom the people of Norway called a king’s daughter, returned home to be reconciled with her kinsmen. She later married a rich man in another country. She and Herr Laurentius had had no children, and so Laurentius’s brother Ketil inherited Skog. He was the grandfather of Lavrans Bjørgulfsøn.

The mountain dome above them shone white with moss and gold from the lichen in the sunshine, and the beacon of weather-beaten timbers towered against the sky like the skeleton of some weird beast.

Dripping with dew and green with the second crop of hay, the pastures shimmered in the white haze, along with pale stubble-fields and yellow trees and mountain ash with glittering red berries. The blue of the mountainsides was dimly visible, rising up out of the mist and steam. Then the fog broke and drifted in wisps among the grassy slopes, and they rode down through the valley in the most glorious sunshine—Kristin foremost in the group, at her father’s side.

Very nice piece of descriptive writing here

Outside, the morning sun gleamed gold on the steep shores of distant Lake Mjøsa, so that all of the faded leafy groves looked like golden dust in the dark blue forests. The lake was rippled with little white specks of dancing foam. The wind blew cold and fresh, making the multicolored leaves float down onto the frost-covered hill.

The child thought he looked like an old crane because his head was small, with a narrow, shiny, smooth pate above a bushy white fringe of hair, and perched on a long, thin, wrinkled neck. His nose was also as big and sharp as a beak. But there was something about him that made Kristin feel at ease and happy just by looking up into his long, furrowed face. His old watery-blue eyes were red-rimmed, and his eyelids were like thin brown membranes with thousands of wrinkles radiating from them. His hollow cheeks, with their reddish web of veins, were crisscrossed with wrinkles that ran down to his small, thin-lipped mouth.