Editing Sigrid Undset (section)

==''Kristin Lavransdatter'' trilogy and ''The Master of Hestviken'' tetralogy==
After the birth of her third child, and with a secure roof over her head, Undset started a major project: ''[[Kristin Lavransdatter]]''. She was at home in the subject matter, having written a short novel at an earlier stage about a period in Norwegian history closer to the Pre-Christian era. She had also published a Norwegian retelling of the [[Arthurian legends]]. She had studied [[Old Norse]] manuscripts and Medieval [[chronicle]]s and visited and examined Medieval churches and [[monasteries]], both at home and abroad. She was now an authority on the period she was portraying and a very different person from the 22-year-old who had written her first novel about the Middle Ages.

It was only after the end of her marriage that Undset wrote her masterpiece. In the years between 1920 and 1927, she first published the three-volume ''[[Kristin Lavransdatter|Kristin]]'', and then the 4-volume ''Olav'' (Audunssøn), swiftly [[translated]] into English as ''[[The Master of Hestviken]]''. Simultaneously with this creative process, she was engaged in trying to find meaning in her own life, finding the answer in God.

Undset experimented with [[modernist]] tropes such as [[Stream of consciousness (narrative mode)|stream of consciousness]] in her novel, although the original English translation by Charles Archer excised many of these passages. In 1997, the first volume of [[Tiina Nunnally]]'s new translation of the work won the [[PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction]] in the category of translation. The names of each volume were translated by Archer as ''The Bridal Wreath'', ''The Mistress of Husaby'', and ''The Cross'', and by Nunnally as ''The Wreath'', ''The Wife'', and ''The Cross''. Subsequent translation of the Hestviken tetralogy by Nunnally are retitled ''Olav Audunssøn (1):Vows'' (''The Axe'')'', …(2) Providence'', (''The Snake Pit''), ''…(3) Crossroads'' (''In The Wilderness''), and ''…(4) Winter'' (''The Son Avenger'').