Some days later Claus Wiephart came with a sledge. He proposed that Olav Audunsson should move down to his house and submit himself to his leechcraft. Olav said yes to this—he could not in any case stay longer at Little Aker. Claus tortured and plagued him sorely at first, wrenched out the stump of his tooth, picked out splinters of bone, cut and burned at the wound. Olav bore it all with patience; nothing made any impression on this strange, quiet joy of having fought and seen that it was of use. Not the thought that Claus would surely see to it that he was well paid for the cure, nor all that he heard of the Swedes harrying the countryside as they withdrew from the realm. He could get no word of how things were at Hestviken—whether the manor had been burned—but this touched him little. Had he had women and children at home, it would have been otherwise.
The grass was green in Claus Wiephart’s garden, and great yellow buds were bursting on the trees, when at last Olav could make ready for the homeward journey. The wound was now almost healed and the skin had grown again on his cheek. The day before he was to leave he asked Claus’s leman if she would lend him her mirror. He sat with it awhile, breathed on the bright disk of brass, wiped it, and looked again at his own face.
His light hair had turned all grey, its curls were lank and lifeless, and his square, clean-cut face was furrowed and faded. The right side was spoiled, the cheek so sunken that the whole face was awry, and the great red scar had an ugly look; the mouth was also drawn down a little on that side.
In a way Olaf Audunsson had always been aware that he was an unusually handsome man. Not that it had made him vain, and in his youth it had annoyed him if anyone spoke of it or if the women let him see that they would be glad to have dealings with him because he was so bright and fair. In an obscure fashion he had felt that his physical grace was itself a part of the tie of flesh and blood that bound him to Ingunn—since he had not yet been fully grown when they were mated. But it had been an element in his knowledge of himself that he was, once for all, a wellfavoured man, rather short than tall, but strong and faultlessly built, without an unhealthy spot in his whole close-knit, shapely frame, fair and bright of hair and skin and eyes, as befitted the race from which he was sprung.
It was something of a humiliation that now this was past and gone, but he took it patiently, as a judgment, that now he must think himself old. Nor was he so many years from the half-hundred, so he must needs bow to it.
And so he came home to Hestviken one fine spring day, to green meadows and bursting leaves in the groves. The houses were standing, but all of them were empty—the Swedes had cut down and carried off all they found. In the byre stood a cow and a heifer that Lady Mærta had bought of Torhild Björnsdatter when she fetched home the children and the serving-maids.
But Mærta Birgersdatter was just as calm as was her wont, and Olav was just as calm as she, and they sat and talked together in the evening. But Olav said very little, for he spoke rather thickly, from the wound in his mouth, and it shamed him to talk. He was glad that the children had been fetched—Torhild Björnsdatter was the only one he was loath should see him, now that he was thus marred.
3 This river (now called the Akers-elv) runs through some of the eastern quarters of the modern town of Oslo (Christiania). Its course lay some little distance to the north-west of ancient Oslo, cutting off the town, by land, from the fortress of Akershus, to the north of which was a marsh (where the city of Christiania was afterwards built). By water (or ice) the distance between mediæval Oslo and Akershus was comparatively short, across the Björvik (Bjaarvik), a small inlet at the head of the fiord. Akershus was newly built at the time of this story; the old royal castle of Oslo, which had been handed over to the Governor of the town and the clergy of St. Mary’s, stood on the opposite shore of the Björvik, at the mouth of the little river Alna, which runs at the foot of the hill of Eikaberg.
4 Men of Lier (near Drammen).
5 These lines are from the Eddic poem called “The Guest’s Wisdom.” The speaker is Odin.
SIGRID UNDSET
Sigrid Undset is a major figure in early twentieth-century literature. A Norwegian born in Denmark in 1881, she worked with the Norwegian underground during the Second World War, fled to Sweden in 1940, and later came to the United States. She is the author of many works of fiction as well as several books for young readers and a number of nonfiction titles. Her novels encompass a variety of settings and time periods, ranging from medieval romances such as the Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy—generally considered to be her masterwork—and The Master of Hestviken tetralogy to modern novels such as The Winding Road, Ida Elisabeth, and The Faithful Wife. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1928. Sigrid Undset died in 1949.
Books by Sigrid Undset
The Master of Hestviken Series
The Axe
The Snake Pit
In the Wilderness
The Son Avenger
Kristin Lavransdatter Trilogy
Kristin Lavransdatter: The Wreath
Kristin Lavransdatter: The Wife
Kristin Lavransdatter: The Cross
BOOKS BY SIGRID UNDSET
The Kristin Lavransdatter Series
The acknowledged masterpiece of the Nobel Prize–winning Norwegian novelist Sigrid Undset, Kristin Lavransdatter has never been out of print in this country since its first publication in 1927. Its story of a woman’s life in fourteenth-century Norway has kept its hold on generations of readers, and the heroine, Kristin—beautiful, strong-willed, and passionate—stands with the world’s great literary figures.
THE BRIDAL WREATH
Volume I
Volume I, The Bridal Wreath, describes young Kristin’s stormy romance with the dashing Erlend Nikulaussön, a young man perhaps overly fond of women, of whom her father strongly disapproves.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-394-475299-0
THE MISTRESS OF HUSABY
Volume II
Volume II, The Mistress of Husaby, tells of Kristin’s troubled and eventful married life on the great estate of Husaby, to which her husband has taken her.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-394-75293-8
THE CROSS
Volume III
Volume III, The Cross, shows Kristin still indomitable, reconstructing her world after the devastation of the Black Death and the loss of almost everything that she has loved.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-394-75291-4
The Master of Hestviken Series
THE AXE
Volume I
Set in thirteenth-century Norway, a land racked by political turmoil and bloody family vendettas, The Axe is the first volume in Sigrid Undset’s epic tetralogy, The Master of Hestviken. In it we meet Olav Audunsson and Ingunn Steinfinnsdatter, who were betrothed as children and raised as brother and sister. Now, in the heedlessness of youth, they become lovers, unaware that their ardor will forge the first link in a chain of murder, exile, and disgrace.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-75273-8
THE SNAKE PIT
Volume II
Olav Audunsson and Ingunn Steinfinnsdatter became lovers when they were barely beyond childhood and endured a long and bitter separation before they could wed. Now they are beginning what each hopes will be a new life—but in Ingunn’s past lies the shame of an illegitimate child and in Olav’s past lies murder. And the guilt they carry may prove more destructive of their happiness than all the years they spent as outcasts. In conveying both the emotional immediacy of Olav and Ingunn’s love and the epic sweep of their story, The Snake Pit is a masterly recreation of a vanished world tainted by bloodshed and haunted by sin and retribution.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-75554-8
IN THE WILDERNESS
Volume III
In the third volume of her medieval epic, Sigrid Undset plunges readers into a world that is at once profoundly alien yet inhabited by men and women as recognizable as our own kin. Heartbroken by the death of his wife and estranged from a son who may not be his, Olav leave
s Hestviken on a journey of adventure, temptation, and remorse that leads him to a bloody reckoning at the gates of Oslo. Vividly, poignantly, and with the fierce grandeur of a Norse folktale, In the Wilderness portrays the terrible conflicts of a man who is both sinner and penitent in an age that lies on the cusp of savagery and faith.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-75553-1
THE SON AVENGER
Volume IV
As a young man Olav Audunsson committed two murders for love. Now he has outlived his enemies and the woman he killed for. But in the last years of his life, Olav must watch his grown children—and particularly his rebellious son Erik—reenact the sins of his youth, with even more fearful consequences. Powerfully written and filled with magnificent vignettes of the daily life of a medieval estate, The Son Avenger suggests a Greek tragedy whose vision of fate coexists with a Christian sense of suffering and forgiveness.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-75552-4
VINTAGE BOOKS
Available at your local bookstore, or visit
www.randomhouse.com
In the Wilderness Page 24
