TRONDELAG-L Archives

Archiver > TRONDELAG > 2007-06 > 1181931687


From: "Victoria Slind-Flor" <>
Subject: [Tronder] Kristin Lavransdatter and Tautra
Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2007 11:35:09 -0700
In-Reply-To: <300242.58598.qm@web56107.mail.re3.yahoo.com>


And if you are a fan of Sigrud Undset, you probably will want to have the
superb new translation by Tina Nunally. She's removed a lot of the archaic
stilted English that was used in the dialogue and the whole reads much more
smoothly.

And speaking of Kristin Lavransdatter: (This is a little bit of a long
story). When I was in college, my roommate was an Irish-American girl from
San Francisco. She was part of a huge family, and her eldest sister--of 11
kids--had become a Trappestine nun. These are nuns of the very strict
Cistercian observance that is pretty much unchanged since the middle ages.

Well, the community--which is based in Dubuque, Iowa--decided a few years
ago to reopen a Cistercian monastery in Norway. And the site they chose is
Tautra, which is the site of the monastery where the fictional Kristin's
sons became monks and where they died of the Bubonic plague.

When I was in Norway, because of my great affection for the Kristin
Lavranstatter books--I even named my eldest daughter Kristin--I decided to
visit Tautra. And I also felt almost a familial connection to the community
because of my roommate's sister.

The ruins of the old monastery can still be seen in Tautra. Several of my
somewhat more remote cousins met me in Stjordal and drove me to Tautra, a
rather long drive, by the way. We wandered through the ruins and then I
walked down several trails photographing wildflowers. Maybe I'll do a blog
posting about it soon and put up some photos.

I had wanted to visit the convent, but it was pretty clear to me that the
cousins--who were at least a decade older than I--were not at all
comfortable with the idea. Perhaps they were from a generation that still
viewed Catholics with a good deal of suspicion. But I know that the nuns do
welcome visitors. In fact, Queen Sonja has visited the monastry in 2003 and
laid the cornerstone for the new building.

If you're interested at all, here's the site of Our Lady of the Mississippi
Abbey and yes, they make the most fabulous caramels in the world.
http://www.mississippiabbey.org/?p=1

And here's the site for Tautra Marikloster, which has Frosta, Norway as its
address.
http://www.tautra.no/English/

The nuns make a wonderful herbal soap that is sold at the monestery and also
at the open-air market in front of the domkirke in Trondheim.
http://www.tautra.no/English/sapene.ssi

At this Wikipedia site you can see a photo of the ruins and the new convent.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tautra_Mariakloster

And this website has a map of Trondheimsfjorden in which you can see the
precise location of Tautra.
http://www.tautra.org/

It's a glorious day here in Northern California. The sunflowers are 8 feet
tall in my garden and all the tomatoes have so many blossoms that I suspect
I'll have a good crop before the 4th of July.

vs-f





-----Original Message-----
From: [mailto:]
On Behalf Of Bev Anderson
Sent: Friday, June 15, 2007 10:39 AM
To:
Subject: Re: [Tronder] Roros Boka

Hi Judith -

I would also recommend the book Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset.
It was a hardcover book with a wonderful glossary when I first read it in
high school in the early 1960s, in English translation (I later obtained a
hardcover edition of the book), and I know it was published as a
three-volume trilogy in paperback much later in the 1970s. I'm not sure if
it's in print yet today or not, but the glossary is full of fascinating
information, including a drawing of buildings on an early farmstead and how
and why they were placed the way they were and how they were used,
descriptions of tings, etc.

Sigrid Undset, according to my Norwegian teacher in the early 1980s, was
an acknowledged expert in early Norwegian history, and she uses that
knowledge about historical reality and wrote a wonderful story about
fictitious people. The setting for the book is Medieval Norway, and the use
of the patronymic names combined with adding farm names on is what gave me
the early grounding of how the naming system was used in Norway, and what we
still use in genealogy research to find ancestors in Norwegian records (name
+ patronymic name + farm/location name). I had already been bitten by the
genealogy bug a year or two before that as a result of a genetics project in
biology class, so Undset's book just moved the interest along (well, for me
at that young age, it did).

Er... I'm kind of a sucker for good historical fiction, so my eyes light
up when I see glossaries and I read them first so I know how historical
facts are used in the story about fictitious people.

Best Wishes,
Bev

Judith Jones <> wrote:

Historically speaking, that was an interesting article you posted for me.
I was surprised by how much of it I could read as I don't know Norwegian.
Thank you for posting it. I learned about a Norwegian practice I didn't know
about but one which was done in Britain during the Middle Ages.
As my grandfather farmed with horses, I understand how important the job was
but I am used to people farming their own land rather than collective
farming, which is the way it was done in Medieval times on manors.
I didn't take Scandinavian history in college because it was political
history and I am much more interested in the social history; how people
lived, grew their crops and raised their children. Since starting this
genealogy, I have learned a little of how people in Norway lived in the 1600
and 1700's. I hope to learn more. Thank you again. Judith Jones





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