Volume 52, Number 15 · October 6, 2005
Love in a Cold Climate
By Brad Leithauser
Kristin Lavransdatter, the Nobel laureate Sigrid Undset's celebrated trilogy of novels set in fourteenth-century Norway, runs over one thousand pages in the old three-in-one Knopf hardcover I'd picked up secondhand, and I chose to read it slowly, lugging the hefty, handsome volume everywhere. This was more than twenty years ago. One of its themes is the stubborn power of magic—the bewitching allure of pagan practices in a society that had officially but not wholeheartedly embraced Christianity—and the trilogy did seem to work magical effects: it drew elderly women to me.
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