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Yes, Kristin Lavransdatter is the highest-grossing Norwegian film of all time. That isn't as impressive as it might sound, as the movie only brought in $3.7 million in box office receipts, but virtually all of that came from domestic sales. Pretty much unknown outside Scandinavia, the movie was a sensation when released in Norway in 1995. An estimated two-thirds of the country's population have viewed it. The movie is based on the first volume of Sigrid Undset's trilogy about the life of an ordinary woman in fourteenth century Norway, which won her the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1928. Directed and written by the celebrated Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann, the film is a very faithful adaptation. The production strove for historical accuracy in costume and settings, and most of the dialogue is taken directly from the novel. (Sigrid Undset is credited as co-screenplay writer.)

The reason I decided to devote a short episode to this movie and to its source novel is they both are worthy attempts to examine an aspect of the Middle Ages virtually ignored in popular culture, the life of ordinary people. Kristin Lavransdatter is the coming of age story of young woman from a prosperous family in rural fourteenth-century Norway who is seduced by and falls in love with a knight with a (justifiably) scandalous reputation. Whether Kristin's mentalité in the novel and film is really "medieval" is a matter of academic debate. But the care with which Undset in her novel and Ullmann in the film recreate the religious rituals, customs, and everyday life in early fourteenth-century Norway is impressive and worth a reading and a viewing.

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This is the final episode--sort of*--of a multi-part series about medieval adultery in literature, history, and popular culture. My co-host Professor Larissa 'Kat' Tracey and I review how adultery has been dealt with in movies about the Middle Ages. We begin with three Hollywood medieval epics, "The Kingdom of Heaven," "Braveheart," and "The Last Duel," and then turn to the focus of our previous episodes, movies about Lancelot and Guinevere and Tristan and Iseult.

*I will be posting a short episode on the film adaptation of Sigrid Undset's Nobel Prize winning novel Kristin Lavransdatter. That really will be our last word on medieval adultery.


This episode includes sound clips from the following movies:

"Kingdom of Heaven" (2006), dir. Ridley Scott: Baldwin IV offers Balian command of the armies of Jerusalem and marriage to his sister (unfortunately the recording is not the best quality)

"The Last Duel" (2021), dir. Ridley Scott: musical score (comp: Harry Gregson Williams)

"Knights of the Round Table" (1953), dir. Richard Thorpe: musical score (comp: Miklós Rózsa)

"Excalibur" (1982), dir. John Boorman: musical score (Predlude to the Liebestod, from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde)

"Lovespell (1981), dir. Tom Donovon: musical score (comp. Paddy Moloney)


Works consulted:
Susan Aronstein, Hollywood Knights: Arthurian Cinema and the Politics of Nostalgia . Palgrave, 2005.

Virginia Blanton, Martha M. Johnson-Olin, and Charlene Miller Avrich, eds., Medieval Women in Film: An Annotated Handlist and Reference Guide. Medieval Feminist Forum
Subsidia Series, 2014.

Kevin J. Harty, ed., Cinema Arthuriana. McFarland, 2002.

Kevin J. Harty, ed., Medieval Women on Film. McFarland, 2020.

Bert Olton, Arthurian Legends on Film and Television. McFarland, 2000.

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Intro and exit music are by Alexander Nakarada

If you have questions, feel free to contact me at richard.abels54@gmail.com

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This is the third of a multi-episode series in which I chat with Dr. Larissa ‘Kat’ Tracey about literary representations of medieval adultery and its reality. In this episode Kat and I survey and discuss the major nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary treatments of medieval adultery, focusing on the stories of La(u)ncelot and Guinevere and of Tristan/Tristram and Isolde/Isolt/Iseult The episode begins with an opera, Richard Wagner’s extremely influential retelling of the tale, Tristan und Isolde. Although composed between 1857 and 1859, the opera did not premiere until 1865, because it was deemed too expensive to stage and its complex, innovative music was thought to be unperformable. We consider how Wagner reconceived his medieval source, Gottfried of Strassburg's thirteenth-century romance, through the lens of Schopenhauer's life-denying philosophy, and how in its composition art imitated life, as Wagner engaged in what was the very least an emotional affair with his wealthy Swiss patron's wife. Kat and I then discuss the very different treatments of these Arthurian stories about adultery by three leading Victorian poets and one early twentieth-century American: the poet Laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson, the decadent aesthete Algernon Swinburne, the Pre-Raphaelite artist and author William Morris, and the popular American poet Edwin Arlington Robinson, whose now all-but-forgotten best-selling poem Tristram won the Pulitzer Prize in 1928. We then turn to how twentieth-century novelists have handled the moral issues arising from medieval adultery in their renditions of the Arthurian legend. The episode concludes with an analysis of adultery in a non-Arthurian medieval novel, Sigrid Undset’s historical trilogy about fourteenth-century Norway, Kristin Lavransdatter (1920-1923), which earned the author the Noble Prize for Literature in 1928, the same year that Robinson’s very different Tristram won the Pulitzer.

Kat and I began this episode with the intention of covering both modern literature and movies dealing with medieval adultery. But it became clear as we were recording that a single episode would be very long. So we decided to talk about medieval adultery on film in a final, fourth episode, which I will be releasing in about a week’s time. And that will be it for medieval adultery, although I plan to have Kat return in future to talk about a subject on which she has written extensively, torture and cruelty in medieval literature. As I have jokingly told her, she is my go to person for medieval perversities.

This episode contains two musical snippets:

Wagner’s “Prelude to the Liebestod [Love Death]” from his opera Tristan und Isolde, conducted by Arturo Toscanini (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBFcDGTzgAI)

“If Ever I Would Leave You” from the musical Camelot, lyrics and music by Lerner and Loewe and sung by Robert Goulet as Lancelot (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xL52hEArSfM)

In my discussion of the literary texts, I drew upon the researches of several scholars, among them:

John Deathridge, Wagner Beyond Good and Evil, University of California Press, 2008

R.J.A. Kilbourn, “Redemption Revalued in Tristan und Isolde: Schopenhauer, Wagner, Nietzsche,” in University of Toronto Quarterly, Volume 67, Number 4, Fall 1998, pp. 781-788

“Tristan und Isolde,” Wikipedia (yes, I do consult Wikipedia)

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Intro and exit music are by Alexander Nakarada

If you have questions, feel free to contact me at richard.abels54@gmail.com