Sigrid Undset, a Norwegian novelist who fled to the US for a brief time during WWII, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1928 largely on the basis of her historical trilogy of medieval Norway, Kristin Lavransdatter (1920-22). The trilogy tells of a 14th-century woman and her spiritual and intellectual growth amid a tumultuous family life. Undset was admired for the depth of her research into social and cultural norms of this period, Old Norse manuscripts, and Medieval chronicles and architecture. Undset’s lesser-known but no less monumental tetralogy Olav Audunssøn is set around the same time as Kristin Lavransdatter.

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