Vikings on Land

KRISTIN LAVRANSDATTER: The Bridal Wreath, The Mistress of Husaby, The Cross. One volume Nobel Prize Edition ($3).

THE MASTER OF HESTVIKEN: The Axe, The Snake Pit. ($3 each). By Sigrid Undset.--Knopf.

The Pair of Stories.--The popular im pression that Norwegian nature is a monotone in its cold indifference Ibsen somewhat dispelled by his twin studies of the two Norwegian extremes: Peer Gynt, shiftless, debonair; and Brandt, steadfast, bitterly serious-minded. To dispel another popular impression--that the Vikings were god-like blonds exclusively engaged in swift sea fights--Sigrid Undset in turn makes twin studies: the Kristin Lavrans datter trilogy of some 500,000 words, and The Master of Hestviken, unfinished tetralogy. Both concern marriage attained through unatoned sin, maintained despite suspicion and recrimination, resolved at last by death. But in Kristin Lavransdatter the heroine, for such she is, glows in all the golden vitality appropriate to a Viking female, and her man is a pagan philanderer; in The Master Ingunn, the heroine- by-courtesy, loses her pale beauty, though her master is a devoted and gentle husband.

Kristin, casually seduced by Erlend, so passionately loves him that she brutally jilts her own betrothed, forces Erlend's promised bride to suicide, marries Erlend herself. Then, goaded by the priesthood, her conscience slowly besets her. She carps at Erlend, embitters her seven sons, torments herself, until at last Erlend is killed in a brawl and she herself dies in a nunnery.

A similar fate pursues Ingunn and her master. In righteous wrath Olav had secretly killed Ingunn's lover, but nevertheless married Ingunn to love and cherish her. "Now at last they were safely together. He passed his hand over her shoulder and arm--it was cool and soft as silk; the coverlet had slipped down. He drew it up, bending over her with caresses, and she replied from her drowsiness with little sleepy words of endearment, like a bird twittering on its nightly perch. But his heart was wakeful and easily scared-- it started like a bird that flies up. . . ." The horror of his unconfessed murder haunted him, but he dared not confess to priest or pauper, lest further disgrace crush delicate Ingunn. She chafed under his kindness, marveled that he could forgive her former infidelity, suspected him of retaliating in kind. This finally the good SIGRID UNDSET She did Nobel work at night. man did. Immediately he rued it, lavished yearly more tenderness upon his ailing wife, while she--sad martyr--bore him son after still-born son. Thus The Snake Pit, part two of the tetralogy, ends with the master's murder still unconfessed, unatoned; and promises tremendous cumu lative tragedy in the two unwritten volumes. Less vigorous than the earlier volumes The Snake Pit necessarily strikes a minor key in the story, and would better be read in its proper sequence.

The Significance. Flashing with occasional interludes of traditional Vikings at sea, these five novels chronicle mostly the Vikings on land with their women and priests, their passions and prickly consciences. Rich in detail of 14th century manners and morals, the books are in the best tradition of magnificent historical novel, but in their universality they reflect the sum of human drama.

It was the first rilogy that earned Author Undset the Nobel prize, for Kristin Lavransdatter combines the glamor of saga with the timelessness of fine fiction, the accuracy of sound history.

The Author. Archaeologist and historian by training, Author Undset is a novelist by instinct and by closely scheduled labor. Dressed in the national costume of a mediaeval Viking matron, she devotes the day to her five children, to her 16th century house, to her famous flower garden. and the quiet evening to her writing.

The Nobel prize for 1928, recently awarded her, amounts this year to $42,000, some half of which she has already given to charitable maintenance of mentally deficient children. The Nobel Prize, established in 1896 by the will of Alfred Bernhard Nobel, the Swede who invented dynamite, consists of five annual awards--one of them for "idealistic literature." Notable recipients have been Kipling, Maeterlinck, Tagore, Knut Hamsun, Anatole France, Yeats, Shaw, Henri Bergson.