Status Updates From The Master of Hestviken

The Christian faith had been to him a power like the king and the law of the land – he knew that it was to govern his life, and he bowed to it, without reluctance, with reverence and with the recognition that a man must be loyal to all these things if he was to be able to meet his equals, and look them freely in the face without shame.

God sees my heart, and he knows it. But he knows, too, I ween, that the hardest thing you can require of a man is that he shall not avenge his kinswoman’s honour with the sword… I tell you, Olav, the man who can forgive such a thing from his heart, him I would call a Holy man.

Book 2: The Snake Pit begins. Book one was of good quality, with most of Olav’s character development coming in the last 50 pages. Ingunn was the main character, and not an overly sympathetic one at that.

A beautiful confession. “Think you then that the load which your friend has laid upon you is so heavy that you are not able to bear it—a Christian man and His man?”…
“Nay. Nay, I think not that—“

Prayer before confession: “God my Lord, give me discretion to say what I have to say and no more and no less.”

“Men and women must bear resolutely what they have brought upon themselves—“ Olav to Ingunn

On suffering, penance

It is an easy matter, Olav, to be a good Christian so long as God asks no more of you than to hear sweet singing in church, and to yield Him obedience while He caresses you with the hand of a father. But a man’s faith is put to the test on the day God‘s will is not his.

“ You know well, Olav, that motherless and friendless you are not–no Christian man is that. You, as we all, have the mightiest brother in Christ, our Lord, and his mother is your mother–and with her, I trust, is she, your mother who bore you. I have always thought that the Lady Sancta Maria prays yet more to her Son for those children who must grow up motherless year below than for us others.”

Comments on the reasons for requiring a public marriage

It dawned on Olav the while that he who has once left the straight path of honor soon finds himself in broken ground, where he may be forced to many a crooked leap.

I’m hooked. Undset’s writing is just as captivating as I remembered.