God, my God, have You chased me up to the skies and down to the bottom of the sea? Olav had once ended up alone before God’s countenance beneath the ink-blue vault of a winter’s night. That was the time when he lost half of his life. Now that he had lost everything he had tried to put in Ingunn’s place, he was forced to feel God’s eyes on him again, as if peering from the forests of kelp in the darkness of the sea floor.
I have found the Olav Audunssøn tetralogy to be delightfully entertaining and immersive (telling, as it does, the tale of one nobleman’s dramatic life story in Medieval Norway), and Winter ties it all up nicely. As the fourth and final volume in this series, the entire thing had the feeling of a denouement or epilogue — everything truly exciting happens in the earlier volumes; this would probably not much satisfy as a standalone read — and I had to keep reminding myself to put it in the larger context; and when I did, I had to admit that author Sigrid Undset ended her epic exquisitely. I am so delighted to have taken a chance on this new English translation (by Tiina Nunnally) of the 1926 classic and can only hope it’s discovered by more modern day readers. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
He no longer gave any thought to himself or his own concerns. He considered himself an old man now, and he’d made his choice as to what would become of him. Yet for that very reason it seemed there was only one purpose behind everything he might still achieve and accomplish until night came to claim him — and that was to protect these two young maidens. How their future might take shape was not something that worried him greatly — he was certain it would turn out in the best possible way. When the time came, he would undoubtedly marry them off, and it would be a most peculiar man who wouldn’t want to bear such treasures through the world on outstretched arms if he ever had the good fortune to acquire them. But there was plenty of time for Olav to consider this matter; both maidens were still so young.
The last volume in the series culminated in fearsome battle scenes as the Norwegian king called upon his noblemen to resist an incursion by a Swedish duke. Now an “old man” approaching fifty (“he was now gray-haired and the right side of his face had sunk inward, his cheek crisscrossed with furrows from the fearsome scar“ received in that battle), Olav Audunssøn — the Master of the Hestviken estate on the Oslo Fjord — has settled into a calm domestic routine with his daughter, Cecilia, and his foster daughter, Bothild; his son and heir having left the estate years earlier for parts unknown. Olav assumes that settling his daughters into appropriate marriages would be the last official duty of his life, but when his son Eirich does return home (in the company of his handsome but feckless best friend, Jørund), Olav allows the boy to have his say in matters — to everyone’s detriment. This shift to an Austenian focus on courting and marriage might seem like it belongs in a different series, but as Olav is in his twilight years and his lifelong concern was about keeping faith with his ancestors and continuing a respectable family line, seeing how the generations carry on does make for an appropriate finish to his story.
After Olav died, folks did not consider his reputation to be as glowing as Brother Eirik would have wanted — and all the grandchildren were fully aware of this. Olav had been a brave soldier, a capable and honest landowner. But he was odd and unapproachable and a gloomy companion in the company of more cheerful men.
In the end, Olav’s was a respectable but not a happy life: by keeping a promise to his wife (who suffered and wasted away so young), Olav was forced to live outside the community and fellowship of the Church; punishing himself and those around him with coldness and distance. Undset masterfully demonstrates the consequences of Olav’s early conflict between duty and love, and it warrants the epic length of these four volumes to follow all the ripples through time. And then she ends the whole thing with an ironic, stinging paragraph: The Great Death arrived and decimated the lineage, although there were still many descendants alive after the plague had passed. In God’s time, the suffering of any one man doesn’t add up to much, so what was the point of all this pain?
