![]() ![]() ![]() (b) Ragnfrid is a mistress of “mournful spirit” and looks “ten years older than her husband instead of three”, perhaps because “she took the deaths of her children unreasonably hard”, but she had once been “gracious and happy” and ![]() (a) Lavrans is “a kind and helpful master to his tenants” with a “lively spirit in his own way”, a man “who might join in a dance or start up singing when the young people frolicked on the church green on sleepless vigil nights” and Is this the kind of thing that stops you up, too?Īll one needs to know to proceed is this: (It took me longer to start-stop through those first paragraphs than it ultimately took to read Part One.) When I put Kristin Lavransdatter aside, and picked up another book instead, I resented - for a time - the fact that it, too, was not set in the mountains of Norway in the fourteenth-century.ĭon’t you love it when a world that you visit on the page suddenly seems more real than the nuts-and-bolts of your own?ĭon’t let the details of lineage and the familial interconnections and agreements in the first pages of this novel put you off. (This might seem unbelievable, but others have found it so too.) Not the least of which being that it gripped my attention more tightly than any of the contemporary novels that I was reading at the time. Acts of violence and devotion, rape and worship, funerals and betrothals, love-scenes and convent-life, adultery and illness: this medieval saga has so many facets to it that I was not expecting. ![]()
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