Status Updates From The Master of Hestviken

Long ago he had acknowledged the truth of Bishop Torfinn‘s words: the man who is bent upon doing his own will shall surely see the day when he finds he has done that which he never willed.

Olav encounters Christ Crucified

“Suddenly he bent over his wife and cautiously touched with his lips the moist, open sores on her thin shoulder blades; he had recalled something he had heard–of holy men who kissed the sores before they bound up the lepers whom they tended…He accused her of nothing now.”

The man was not thinking so much of his child. He wept chiefly over himself–it was as though he saw the last remnant of his honour and his pride lying crushed beneath his feet.

“I know this slaying was a small matter in the beginning–had I declared it at once. But I took the wrong road at the start–and now the guilt has grown, and I see that it will go on and breed new guilt. And now I must turn about…else I shall become the worst of inhuman wretches.”

“I go to mass as often as I have the means to come thither, and two or three times a day when I am in the town. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy mind and all thy heart, we are told–methinks God must know I do so–I knew not that such love was within the power of man until I myself abandoned his covenant and lost Him!”

“He searched in their leather bags, did not find what he wanted, and opened another bag. There he came upon some little garments–they might have fitted a child of four years. Unconsciously his eyes fell upon his wife–Ingunn’s head was bent and her face was red as fire. Olav said nothing, packed the bag again, and went out.”

Olav’s affairs seem less significant when at war, surrounded by death and vice. Can be good and bad.

(After Benedikt describes Limbo)
Olav interrupted,”Then meseems, Sira Benedikt, that many a man might be tempted to desire he had died an infant and unbaptized.”
The priest replied:”It is so ordained, Olav, that in our baptism we are called to a great inheritance. And we must pay the price of being men.”

… For the sake of the woman who had been given into his hands while both were yet little children. And he would protect her and love her, as he had protected her when a boy and loved her since first he knew he was a man–and if he got no happiness with her, since she could never be aught but a sick and useless wife, that made no difference, he now realized–he would love her and protect her to her last hour.

Ingunn came in and stood at her table. She made a cross with her knife on the loaf before cutting it up.

White horses and too fair wives are not for country folk, for they have no time to watch them.

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.