|
|
Alice | Tin.it | Foto album | Disco remoto | Community | |
Gunnar's Daughter, originally published in Norway under the title "Fortællingen om Viga-Lyot og Vigdis", 1909
Sigrid Undset, a Nobel Prize winner, is primarily read for her two massive historical novels set in medieval Norway, Kristin Lavransdatter and The Master of Hestiviken, both of which offer unparalleled reading experiences that no one interested in 20th century literature should forego. Set beside these authentic masterpieces, Gunnar's Daughter is an undeniably minor effort, but still displays Undset's immense talent and remarkable psychological intuitions. The author's first venture into historical fiction (after years of painstaking research), often regarded as a mere practice-piece for her stunning later work, it tells a gripping, relentless story in the stringent, forthright style of the Icelandic Sagas from which Undset deliberately drew her inspiration. The narrative advances swiftly through confrontational dialogue and essential action, hitting the high-spots like an operatic melodrama, with a minimum of interconnecting material--just so much as a bard might give us to set the scene and identify the principal actors. The reader is immediately transported to early 11th century Norway and Iceland in the days of the Vikings, when Christianity has only recently begun to take root and the old ways extolling strength and stoicism, personal and family honour, and the obligatory avenging of offense still prevail.
Viga-Lyot, or Lyot the Killer, has earned his nickname by proper manly conduct on Viking raids and for taking satisfactory vengeance, while still a lad, on his father's slayers. An Icelander, he accompanies his kinsman Veterlide to Norway on a trading trip and there falls violently in love with their host's daughter, Vigdis. The only child of the wealthy Gunnar, Vigdis has been lovingly indulged and guarded throughout her maidenhood by her father's prosperity and high standing. It is said Gunnar will never betroth her without her own consent and Vigdis has already rejected a suitor, Eyolv Arneson, who is now spitefully trying to blacken her reputation through lying gossip. Although Lyot fails to convince the cautious Veterlide to plead his suit with Gunnar as custom demands, his courting of Vigdis proceeds apace until another potential rival appears. Kaare, an upright and handsome young man, is Vigdis' childhood friend and she receives him too warmly for Lyot's liking. In resentment, and hot to put Kaare down, Lyot rashly challenges him to a horse-fight. But his demeanor on the field, once he sees Kaare's horse is superior and his own bound to lose, becomes unsporting and reckless, resulting in Kaare being wounded and his horse slain. Ashamed of Lyot's conduct, Vigdis sits weeping with the dead horse's head in her lap while Lyot sullenly retires with Eyolv Arneson, leaving Veterlide to attempt the required amends to Kaare and excuse his young kinsman's behaviour with a disapproving Gunnar.
His hopes now compromised through his own fault, Lyot stubbornly refuses to return humbly under Gunnar's roof to make his peace and remains defiantly with the Arnesons, exposed to Eyolv's insinuations about Vigdis' supposed dishonour. While refuting Eyolv's lies, Lyot himself grows careless with Vigdis' name, soothing his sore heart by inventing lyrics about his love for her that hint at more than has actually taken place and quickly make the round of the neighborhood. When the household servants warn Vigdis, advising her to have nothing further to do with the unruly Icelander, she is disbelieving. Surely Lyot would never make a public show of the innocently trusting, cherished affection secretly exchanged between them! But when she confronts Lyot with the accusation during a clandestine meeting, he admits it: "It cannot be as bad as that, if I have made a song or two--you cannot have loved me much if you would leave me on that account." "You cannot have loved me either," Vigdis answers angrily. "No sooner did you hear evil spoken of me than you believed it and spread it abroad." Their quarrel quickly becomes irreconcilable. And Vigdis, who has already sounded her father out, is aware that Lyot's suit will never be favourably received, indeed that Gunnar and Kaare are seriously considering seeking Lyot out to demand satisfaction from him. Now she, too, has serious misgivings and fears she has bestowed her heart on an unworthy man.
When Lyot grasps that Vigdis means what she says, he commits an irreparable deed. High-handedly determined to have his way, he drags her into the woods, overcomes her strenuous resistance with brute force, and takes her maidenhead. Certain that Vigdis now has no choice but to flee with him, dispensing with the difficult task of obtaining Gunnar's consent to an honourable marriage, he is amazed and stung by her blunt refusal. "Once more shall I woo you, my play-fellow," he says arrogantly, "but first you shall have time to reflect--when summer comes I shall ask you again if you will have me." To which Vigdis replies, "Then you shall see, Viga-Lyot, that my will is as strong as yours." And so it proves to be.
Undset's portrayal of Vigdis' shattered self-esteem and horror at revealing what has happened to her is penetrating and convincing; there is perhaps no equally restrained yet accurate description of a rape victim's plight in literature. Vigdis' shame and impotent anger, her months of severe depression, and her subsequent fear of men are all trenchantly described. Only the servant-woman Æsa shares Vigdis' struggle to conceal a loathed pregnancy, but neither to Æsa nor to anyone else, in all the years to come, does Vigdis ever confide how she was treated, physically overpowered with brutal disregard of her person and her will; she judges it the lesser of two evils to let it be believed she was seduced and forsaken, giving that terse explanation even to King Olav when he inquires about the father of her bastard son.
Vigdis ruthlessly abandons her child at birth, but the baby is saved and fostered by Æsa's kin. When Lyot makes his promised summer visit, now greatly subdued by realization of the wrong he has done, she savagely denies she ever bore a child and turns him away with scorn. "Maybe you thought that I sat here waiting to see you again?" "Yes," Lyot admits. But Vigdis is adamant. She will not follow him and curses Lyot when he sorrowfully wishes her joy: "May you have the worst of deaths--and live long and miserably--you and all you hold dear." With these bitter words they part for nigh eighteen years.
The boy Ulvar is not brought to his mother until she requires his presence to scotch her unwitting father's plan to betroth her to Kaare. But thereby the family disgrace is revealed and the Arnesons make hay with the news. Striving to uphold his honour in the face of Eyolv's taunts, Gunnar takes a fatal wound and, since he has no son, it falls on Vigdis to exact retribution. Her grim accomplishment of the obligation and her flight through the snowy forest with Ulvar in her arms to escape the retaliation of Eyolv's kin form one of the most dramatic episodes in the novel. Equally striking is the scene where Vigdis obtains justice from the king in her blood-feud with the Arnesons; Olav is attracted to her, makes heady advances, and royally maintains his dignity when rejected. Unlike Lyot, the king takes Vigdis at her word when she says no. Thereafter Vigdis devotes her ruined life to the skilful management of the lands inherited from Gunnar, steadily accumulating wealth to bolster Ulvar's impaired standing, stubbornly refusing to place herself in any man's power through marriage, and sternly raising her son to avenge the affront she received from his father. For Vigdis, vengeance against Lyot is a dish to be savoured cold.
The scene then shifts to Lyot's doings in Iceland, and it is here that Undset's story-telling prowess is perhaps most impressive, firmly holding the reader's interest through a series of ordinary events and developing a sympathy for Lyot that he had not enjoyed while we were bound up in Vigdis' drama. Lyot's impulsive, wilful personality undergoes no fundamental alteration--he is still intransigent, touchy, and difficult to deal with--but it is tempered by his inability to forget his humiliation in Norway, his recognition that he has only himself to blame for his woes, and his nostalgic yearning for Vigdis, his first love, irrevocably lost to him. The days of his light-hearted and light-minded making of songs are over. Lyot broods in moody silence and keeps his thoughts to himself. Urged by his kinsfolk, he eventually contracts a suitable match with a beautiful young woman, the tender Leikny, but is unable to reciprocate her affection, even when he regretfully perceives her suffering and knows that his coldness is to blame for it. "More heavily than all the rest she weighs on my mind," he says much later, "for all joy was taken from her without fault of hers." When his young children perish in an accident, and the distraught Leikny dies not long afterwards, Lyot feels that Vigdis' curse is coming home to roost. With nothing to hold him in Iceland any longer, he resumes his former sea-raiding ways under the false name of Uspak, the Imprudent.
The final quarter of Gunnar's Daughter turns on the seventeen-year-old Ulvar's disdain for the Icelander said to be his father and his loving admiration for a stranger who rescues him from a tight spot on the coast of Scotland during Ulvar's first Viking expedition. The man who befriends him, a sea-captain named Uspak, quickly draws Ulvar's life-history from him, but is chary about discussing his own, especially when he hears Ulvar's cutting remarks about his father. The mature Lyot has grown reserved and careful. With private wonder and joy, he recognizes this fine young man as the son whose begetting Vigdis denied and acts towards him with a father's unsparing love, never alluding outright to their relationship. Yet when they part, exchanging gifts, "Uspak" accepts Ulvar's invitation to visit him at home in Norway.
The tragic climax ensues in a tense dispute constructed on some of Undset's most potent dialogue and acute observation of character. To Lyot's desire to be reconciled and Ulvar's plea that his parents make their peace, once he discovers who Uspak really is, Vigdis opposes a stony determination to reap vengeance at last, now that the time is ripe and Lyot himself has unwisely sought a meeting. Once more the estranged lovers become embroiled in their ancient quarrel. Vigdis' vitriolic recriminations are unanswerable and her despairing son is bid choose between Lyot and herself. It is Lyot who finally determines the issue, deliberately proferring an insult to Vigdis' honour that Ulvar cannot refuse to avenge.
This late turning-point in Gunnar's Daughter --the first moment in the whole sorrowful tale where a happy outcome could be achieved if only the years had mellowed Vigdis as they have Lyot--is the episode most likely to unsettle the modern reader, who must here remind himself that forgiveness is not necessarily a virtue in a society living by the law of an eye for an eye. What Vigdis herself intimately longs for is what she sacrifices to the implacable code of the blood-feud. She might indeed have refrained if Lyot had not provoked her by coming to Norway, renouncing at last his engrained habit of never stooping to offer reparation. Vigdis finds neither release nor satisfaction when her son, the avenger, wordlessly brings her what she has demanded, Lyot's severed head, before going forth alone in the world, never to return again.
© Wordreign, August 1999
Home Recent Books
Images from Myst © 1993 Cyan, Inc. All rights reserved. Myst® is a registered trademark of Cyan, Inc. Used by permission.
