Though she was a far greater novelist than G.K. Chesterton, Sigrid Undset’s apologetic essays were certainly Chestertonian. And she loved his work. The story is that she once slammed “The Everlasting Man” on an editor’s desk, declaiming: “This is the best book ever written. It has to be translated into Norwegian!”
2024 was a year of anniversaries for 1928 Nobel Prize winner and Catholic convert, Sigrid Undset. The Feast of All Saints marked the centenary of her reception into the Catholic Church, while June 10 was the seventy-fifth anniversary of her death in 1949. 2025 marks another centenary: the first volume of her tetralogy, The Master of Hestviken (titled Olav Audunssøn in Tiina Nunnaly’s new translations). Perhaps these anniversaries will spark interest in, as a Catholic Herald article calls her, “the greatest Catholic writer you’ve never heard of.”
Her greatness consisted in both the style and substance of her writing. Indeed, as Deacon Mathias Ledum (who is set to be the first priestly vocation from Lillehammer, Norway, in 500 years if he is ordained on schedule this June 28) observes, she “became the Norwegian G.K. Chesterton, as she used her career and writings to present the Catholic faith for the Norwegian public and show that there is no contradiction between being Norwegian and being Catholic.”
Born in Denmark, the oldest of three daughters of Charlotte and Ingvald Undset, Sigrid had Norwegian, Danish, and Scottish ancestors. The Undsets soon moved to Oslo, Norway, then called Kristiania, where her father, an archeologist, worked in a museum. A friend of Heinrich Schliemann, the discoverer of ancient Troy, Ingvald gave Sigrid a terracotta horse Schliemann had bequeathed him as a toy. He loved the idea that she was playing with something a Trojan child might have had.
Ingvald died at the age of forty, when Sigrid was only eleven. Sigrid’s mother was able to make do on a widow’s pension, and the private school Sigrid attended ensured that she could continue her education as before. Due to her disagreement with the leftist and “progressive” institution, Sigrid stopped attending at sixteen and attended a trade school. She made this decision in order to gain skills to support herself while she pursued her interests in painting and writing.
The strategy was successful. She worked at an electrical company for ten years while plying her artistic trades in her spare time. Having already begun writing when young, she took six years to write a novel about medieval Norway based on the Icelandic sagas she had long loved. When she finished at twenty-two or twenty-three (scholars debate this), it was rejected. She persisted, however, and published a novel called Fru Marta Oulie set in modern times and dealing with adultery. She followed up this book with two more contemporary novels. They were successful enough that Undset quit her secretarial job to make a living as a writer. She applied for a fellowship and began a tour of Europe that led her to Rome in 1909. There she would make very fateful decisions about her life.
Undset went to Mass and visited churches in the eternal city. But she also met another Norwegian, the painter Anders Castus Svarstad. Though he was older by thirteen years and married with three children, the two began an affair. Svarstad’s divorce was finalized in 1912, and Undset married him. A son, Anders also, was born in 1913 and then a daughter, mentally handicapped. Undset had found out that Svarstad’s first wife, in poverty, had put her children in an orphanage. She took in those three children, one of whom was also mentally handicapped, and raised them for a time.
In 1919, pregnant with a third child, Undset settled in Lillehammer before her marriage collapsed. There, she rented a recently built wooden house from the painter Gunnar Hjort. She also returned her writing to the Middle Ages she so loved. She had already published a short novel set in this period, but her new project was much bigger: an epic story of the life of a fourteenth-century woman who marries a man against her father’s will, pays the price for her own foolishness, yet finds Catholic redemption in the end. It was Kristin Lavransdatter. With the money she made from this work, she purchased the house and, later, another wooden house that she moved to the property and connected to the first building.
This turn toward things Catholic might have been surprising. After all, she was nominally raised in the state Lutheran Church by agnostic parents (at best). But, even during her marriage, Undset had begun read Robert Hugh Benson, Hilaire Belloc, and Chesterton. By 1924, when her marriage was officially over, she joined them as Catholics and began to write from an explicitly Catholic standpoint. She was mocked in her country as “The Catholic Lady” and “The Mistress of Bjerkebæk.” Yet success continued. The Master of Hestviken (1925-1927) was another medieval Catholic saga, this time with a male protagonist. She wrote Catholic apologetics, saints’ lives, and assorted non-fiction. She also translated two volumes by Benson and one volume by Chesterton. She even paid a friend to translate Belloc’s The Catholic Church and History.
Though she was a far greater novelist than Chesterton, her apologetic essays were certainly Chestertonian. She wrote that “those who hold most firmly to dogmas today are those whose only dogma is that dogmas should be feared like the plague.” No wonder: she loved his work. It may be apocryphal, but the story is that she slammed The Everlasting Man on the Aschehoug publishing editor’s desk, declaiming: “This is the best book ever written. It has to be translated into Norwegian!” Whether this happened or not, this was the volume of his she translated in 1931. On a trip to England in 1928, the year she won the Nobel Prize in Literature, she had even met Chesterton.
A third-order Dominican, Undset was active on the page and in person in the 1930s. She began a prayer group for priestly vocations called the St. Eyestein’s Association, named for a medieval bishop. She studied, prayed, and continued to write—including denunciations of the Nazis.
For this reason, she had to flee Norway as World War II began. Her oldest son, Anders, a soldier, was shot close to her house—a mere twelve-and-a-half miles away during this world war. She ended up in New York, assisting the Norwegian government in exile and working with the Scandinavian Catholic League, until war’s end.
Spent by grief and stress at the end of the war, she nevertheless returned to Lillehammer and kept working. She arranged to have several of her books written during the war published in Denmark and Norway. She wrote a great many essays and journalistic piece. And she nearly finished the marvelous biography of St. Catherine of Siena that was published posthumously. She had also begun a work on Edmund Burke that may also have been on a large scale. She did not get very far, however, for in 1949 she died at sixty-seven. Her epitaph read, “Behold, the handmaid of the Lord.”
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An earlier and shorter version of this essay was published in Gilbert. The author wishes to thank Geir Hasnes for this revision.
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The featured image is a photograph of Sigrid Undset, taken in 1923, by Anders Beer Wilse. This file is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
