Challenging authority: Saga, gossip, ballad and legend as narrative voices in Sigrid Undset's 'Kristin Lavransdatter' (Norway)

This study presents a new reading of Sigrid Undset's trilogy Kristin Lavransdatter, interpreting the trilogy as a multivoiced dialogue that challenges the narrative authority of the text's introductory epic saga voice. The investigation departs from those previous interpretations of the novel that have discussed the work's correspondence to an extratextual history and reality. It analyzes instead how the narrative voices of the text themselves contest and create “true story”. Mikhail Bakthin's concept of the polyphonic novel is applied to consider the folk genres of saga, gossip, ballad and legend as already saturated voices that insert their own realities of collective common story, romance, the otherworldly and the fantastic into the predictable official story of the saga. The tensions between history and story, diachronic and synchronic narrative, fact and fiction, Truth and truths emerge as essential contradictions that create the dynamic of the narrative. From its historical epic beginning, this quietly carnivalesque text of Kristin Lavransdatter juxtaposes biography with adventure stories that challenge given life script both thematically and on a metanarrative level. The ultimate interface between everyday words and the sacred Word in this dialogue brings the narrative into the genre of legend. As an outcome of this investigation, the relationship between narrative and ideology is necessarily tested. The interpretation at once challenges the equation of conservative ideology and monologic text, and seeks to demystify the trilogy in the national narrative as history and to emphasize it instead as story. It also calls for a consideration of the author's voice in the trilogy as rhetorical as well as serious, creatively dialogic as well as factually accurate.