Co-sponsored by the Department of German, Nordic, and Slavic+, the Department of History, the Jay and Ruth Halls Visiting Scholar Fund, and the Anonymous Fund.
The Norwegian-Danish writer Sigrid Undset (1882–1949) found her greatest success with her multi-volume medieval novels for which she won the Nobel Prize in 1928. Early in her career she wrote Fortællingen om Viga-Ljot og Vigdis, an homage to the saga tradition. During the 1920’s, she produced seven books with astonishing rapidity—the trilogy Kristen Lavransdatter and the tetralogy Olav Audunssøn, both meticulously researched multi-generational epics. Undset continued to explore the Middle Ages through a series of essays and translations of hagiographies. For her as for many of her peers, art was a political action. Undset came of age during a key period of self-discovery for Norway, as artists and intellectuals strove to reclaim their history, language, and literature after centuries of Danish rule. She believed the key to cultural independence for Norway lay in an appeal to the medieval golden age, where she also found a spirit of religiosity and communality that possessed the antidote for the cold impersonality of modernity. Her own portrayal of medieval Norway responded to alternative visions proposed by fellow Norwegian artists such as Henrik Ibsen and Knut Hamsun. In this paper, I focus on Undset’s medieval writings, fiction and nonfiction, and how they occurred within a larger program of political activism in Norway.
Laura Michele Diener (Ph.D., Ohio State), teaches medieval and ancient history at Marshall University. She received her PhD in history from The Ohio State University and has studied at Vassar College, Newnham College, Cambridge, and most recently, the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She teaches course on ancient peoples including the Vikings, Romans, Ancient Egyptians, and Celts and has written about medieval spirituality, medieval embroidery, and medieval hair; her current project is a biography of the Norwegian Nobel-prize-winning writer Sigrid Undset titled A World Perilous and Beautiful.