Sigrid Undset had an ugly house.
Not really, but when one approaches the facade of Bjerkebaek, her home in the town of Lillehammer in her native Norway, it is hard to find it charming. Truth be told, it looks like a military bunker.
What is visible is a modern accretion, part of the Bjerkebaek Visitors Center added in recent decades to the home (really two adjacent houses) that Undset built out of 14th-century predecessors. Once inside, one encounters a different world, a warren of rooms full of books, pictures, Catholic devotional items, religious artifacts and more. “Locals say the house is like Sigrid Undset herself,” my guide told me on a May 2026 visit. “A bit cold and unwelcoming on the outside, but warm and full of life inside.”
Anyone seeing a picture of the author could believe it: She had a somewhat fierce mien, and even images of her receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in Oslo in 1928 show an unsmiling woman. Her nonfiction can feel equally no-nonsense and curt. But those who knew her—and the millions who have read her fiction over the past century—encountered an author who was indeed warm and full of life, one whose life and work are points of pride in a country where Undset, a rare Catholic, is an unlikely national hero.
Much of Undset’s fiction—including her famous trilogy, Kristin Lavransdatter—is set in 14th-century Scandinavia. The novels tend to run long, with the aforementioned trilogy topping out at over 1,100 pages. And while Kristin was translated into English by 1927, another seven decades would pass before other translations appeared to compete with an original whose language can feel frankly archaic and stilted to the American ear.
Despite these obstacles, Undset has retained a significant audience of American readers, including many Catholics, who have found her books valuable spiritual reading. Over the years in America and elsewhere, surveys that asked for readers’ favorite novel elicited Kristin Lavransdatter a surprising amount of the time. Is Kristin like its chronological twin Ulysses, a book that discerning men and women of taste are required to pretend to have read even if they never got past plump Buck Mulligan? Or is there something more to this woman, whose novels were admired by everyone from Willa Cather to Dorothy Day to William T. Vollmann, whose life is being studied by the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Causes of Saints?
Journey to Lillehammer
Born in 1882 in Kalundborg, Denmark, Undset moved with her family to the Norwegian capital of Kristiania, now called Oslo, when she was 2. Her father died when she was 11, and Undset went to work as a secretary in Kristiania while she was still a teenager. Bored with the work, she began to write novels, failing in her first several attempts until 1907, when Marta Oulie was published. Much of the diary-style novel is about adultery—Undset’s first published line was “I have been unfaithful to my husband”—and caused something of a stir in Norwegian literary circles.
Several years later in Rome, she met a Norwegian painter, Anders Castus Svarstad; he was married with three children and 13 years older than she was. After he divorced his wife, the couple married in 1912 and had a child a year later. A second child was born mentally handicapped. In 1919, Undset, now pregnant with their third child, moved to Lillehammer while her husband stayed behind in Rome. The couple soon divorced, and Undset decided to put down roots in Lillehammer, using the ruins of traditional Norwegian homes in the area to build Bjerkebaek.
Norway is geologically part of the same mountain range that makes up the Appalachians, though the latter have been worn down by millions of years of erosion; Norway’s landscape, on the other hand, has been profoundly affected by the ice sheets and glaciers that preserved its mountains but carved deep valleys across the terrain as they advanced and retreated from age to age. Lillehammer exists along the hillside of one such valley, perched over Lake Mjosa, the largest lake in Norway. Its steep slopes make the town ideal for skiing and other alpine sports, and in 1994, Lillehammer hosted the Winter Olympics.
Today, Lillehammer is a town of around 30,000 with a thriving tourism industry, but it still has the feel of a small village. Everywhere one sees hiking residents and tourists—an R.E.I. ad gone mad—and the beauty of the natural landscape overwhelms any sense that modernity has encroached on the valley. A large outdoor museum at one end of town, Maihaugen, offers the chance to explore what medieval Norway was like, complete with the hulking wooden “stave churches” unique to Norway. Maihaugen itself predates Undset’s arrival to Lillehammer, and it is not hard to imagine its restored medieval homes, barns and churches having a profound influence on her imagination as she composed her historical epics.
Writing the Trilogy
After her divorce and the birth of her third child, Undset began writing Kristin Lavrandsdatter, publishing its three volumes (The Wreath, The Wife and The Cross) between 1920 and 1922. The trilogy tells the story of a woman born in the Gudbrandsdalen Valley (of which Lillehammer is a part) in Norway in the 14th century. Engaged to a trustworthy neighbor of her pious parents, the titular character has an affair with a freewheeling and adulterous knight, Erlend Nikulaussøn; after she is discovered to be pregnant, she marries Nikulaussøn and moves to his estate. The couple raise a large family, but Nikulaussøn proves both to be a poor husband and a political provocateur. After Nikulaussøn is arrested for treason, Kristin is left to raise her children and defend her family’s properties against all comers, including a suitor or two. Her husband eventually returns to his family and tries to reconcile with Kristin.
After Kristin is accused by locals of adultery and the murder of her own son in various intrigues, her ne’er-do-well husband defends her honor and innocence, dying in the process. Kristin gives up the family property and moves to Trondheim to live in an abbey, becoming much more devoted to her Catholic faith (a thematic advantage of setting the books in the 14th century is that the Reformation is not even a consideration; there are no Lutherans yet). While caring for patients in Trondheim during an outbreak of bubonic plague, Kristin saves the life of a local child who has been blamed for the pestilence. She contracts plague herself, as do two of her sons, and…well, you’ll have to read it yourself.
Though the trilogy is packed with action and intrigue, it is not salacious or prurient in the least, and Kristin’s salutary sacrifices made the novels recommended reading in religious settings as well as in secular Norwegian society. Among its biggest fans in the United States was Dorothy Day, who encouraged women in the Catholic Worker movement for years to read the trilogy.
Embrace of Faith
Even before she began her trilogy, Undset had begun taking a much more intense interest in Catholic Christianity, reading widely in spirituality and history, including the works of the English writers G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc and Msgr. Robert Hugh Benson. The shelves of her home in Lillehammer are chock-full of the books of all three, and a picture of Msgr. Benson graces one wall; she named her third son Hans Benedict Hugh partly to honor him.
Undset entered the Catholic Church on All Saints’ Day in 1924. She had been baptized a Lutheran as a child but raised agnostic, and was critical of the Norwegian state church before and after her conversion to Catholicism. In 1928, she became a lay Dominican. To be Catholic in Norway at the time was a somewhat lonely destiny: Catholicism was illegal from the Reformation until 1845, and monastic orders remained banned until 1897. Jesuits were not allowed into the country until 1956, seven years after Undset’s death. Lillehammer had no Catholic church until 1970. To many Norwegians at the time, her embrace of Rome was an embarrassment, leading to the sneering nickname for her: “The Catholic Lady.”
Undset’s faith clearly influenced everything that came from her pen in the years to come. Her first three novels had appeared one after another in her late 20s: Marta Oulie in 1907, The Happy Age a year later and Gunnar’s Daughter the year after that. Next came a book that from its title sounds like it should be from 1996, not 1911: Jenny. It was followed by Spring in 1914.
After the Lavrandsdatter trilogy came the tetralogy The Master of Hestviken, published between 1925 and 1927. Eight more novels would appear between 1931 and 1939, including two ambitious books that abandoned historical settings for 20th-century Norway, The Wild Orchid and The Burning Bush.
Biographies, essay collections and other nonfiction writings rounded out Undset’s oeuvre; she also published frequently in journals and other venues.
War and Peace
Undset’s receipt of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1928—she is one of four Norwegians to be so honored, the most recent being Jon Fosse in 2023—made her a household name in Norway even for those who had not read her work. It also made her political positions the source of public commentary, including her sharp criticisms of Adolf Hiter and Nazism as Europe headed toward World War II in the late 1930s.
After Germany invaded Norway on April 9, 1940 (Undset had met Dorothy Day in Oslo just two days before), Undset moved to neighboring Sweden. Her son Anders was killed in Norway soon after by the Nazis, who also commandeered her home for officer’s quarters. Undset traveled to the United States the long way—across Finland, the Soviet Union and the Pacific Ocean—and spent the rest of the war in New York.
In January 1941, Undset again met Dorothy Day at a dinner at the New York home of the noted stained-glass artist Viggo Rambusch Sr. Another guest was America’s future editor in chief John La Farge, S.J., who was involved for many years in St. Ansgar’s Scandinavian Catholic League, a society that provided fellowship for Scandinavian Catholics and numbered over 1,000 members at its peak in the 1960s.
Day described Undset and the dinner in her diary. “She is a tall, deep-chested, long-limbed woman with a look of great health and vigor. She has a broad forehead, large, exceptionally beautiful and clear eyes, set flat in the head.”
“So many of our own women in the [Catholic Worker] movement, as well as so many of our readers have been strengthened and enlightened by Madame Undset’s books that I cannot forbear giving this personal little glimpse of her,” Day continued.
Undset spoke and wrote in various venues during the war years against the Nazi regime and on other topics of political interest, including five essays for America. One was a transcribed talk on “truth and fiction” in which she offered the following advice:
We Catholics have the wellspring of Truth to draw from, and we are the heirs to the accumulated truths of pre-Christian ages. To us, it should not be fiction versus facts, but fiction should relate facts to truths, through knowledge, imagination, intuition and conscientious work. It should really be our rule, never to tell lies, and to tell the truths that must be told—the truths we need not tell should always be implicit behind our work.
After the liberation of Norway in 1945, Undset returned to Lillehammer, but no more novels were to come. She suffered from poor health for several years and died of kidney disease in 1949. She is buried in a nearby village and is honored in Lillehammer by the museum at her home and a prominent statue in the middle of town.
Saint Sigrid?
On July 8 of this year, Bishop Fredrik Hansen of Oslo announced that he had initiated a canonization cause for Undset, putting her on the path toward sainthood. “She showed a constant and practical concern for the poor. She gave of herself in caring for her daughter, in her commitment to life and to the sanctity of life,” Bishop Hansen said in a homily. So too, though, were her writings part of the story: “Through her many books she has shaped countless believers, inspired them to live in Christ, and borne witness to our medieval saints.”
The canonization process is a long one, and as a laywoman without the backing of a religious order or a widely recognized local cult of adoration (Norway is home to around 200,000 officially registered Catholics in a country of 5.6 million), Undset might not seem like the most likely candidate to be raised to the altars. But the initiation of the process demonstrates the impact she has had in Norway and elsewhere. “She is far more than an author and Nobel Prize laureate,” said Bishop Hansen. “For us, she is a model of Christian faith, of a life lived in virtue, and of the pursuit of holiness.”
Sigrid Undset has always had an appeal for American readers that seems to transcend—at least in the Catholic Church—many of our tribal boundaries. There are as many articles over the years pleading with readers to give her a try in traditionalist Catholic journals as there are in the pages of America or Commonweal. Some of that might be part of the obsession in some Catholic circles with anything medieval, to be sure. At the same time, Undset’s ability to reach Catholics across the aisle (and in different ages and places) offers a lesson about literature.
No one doubts the literary quality of Kristin Lavransdatter or many of Undset’s other works; she is regarded more or less universally as an illuminating and rare talent. Nor does one have to know her politics or religion, necessarily, to appreciate her work. The present-day novelist William T. Vollmann—who describes himself as religiously “agnostic plus”—has praised Undset as one of his favorite authors. “One need not be Catholic (I am not) to be utterly caught up in Undset’s imagined medieval Norway,” he said in 2006. Nor need one be a particular kind of Catholic, if my own experience rings true. Among those who have called Kristin Lavrandsdatter “the greatest Catholic novel ever written” or remembered reading it as a cherished memory are some of the most religiously and politically progressive people I know; so too are some of her greatest promoters in contemporary American Catholicism people who would surely describe themselves as staunchly traditional and religiously conservative.
What do these novels have that the rest of us need? It is a cliché to suggest that literature can save us. But the life and work of Sigrid Undset suggest that literature can indeed transcend the particular history in which it was born to offer something more, something we can share and appreciate across the ages. Sigrid Undset would call it—without a second thought—Truth. Whether we agree with that or not, we seem all to agree that she was closer to what it is than most of us.
This article appears in October 2026.
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