Join IHE Fellow Amy Fahey and moderator Dr. Elizabeth Clemmons for a virtual conversation on the life, literature, and legacy of Norwegian novelist and Catholic convert Sigrid Undset.

One hundred years ago, following on the success of her masterful trilogy Kristin Lavransdatter, Undset published the first two volumes of The Master of Hestviken. In this tetralogy of medieval Norway, Edith Stein (St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross) saw two worlds standing in opposition: “the gloomy, instinctive world of primordial chaos, and that of God’s spirit hovering over creation.”

From her rural homestead Bjerkebæk to the Hotel Margaret in Brooklyn, where she fled for several years after the Nazi invasion of Norway, Undset gracefully articulated the movements of that hovering Spirit in her fiction, in her literary friendships, and in her profound relationship with “God’s friends,” the Saints.

Her final work, a biography of fellow Dominican St. Catherine of Siena, stands as a testimony to Undset’s enduring faith in the highest aspirations of the human heart in a world where man is once again in danger of descending into “primordial chaos.”