Norwegian Sketches; 11

We invite you to join us for Norwegians get a. Programme of music and commentary produced from materials provided by the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation. The major portion of today's programme will be devoted to readings from good onsets novel. You'll still love her stuff. But first a music selection by Edvard fifth bride and titled seaward. And.

And. Yes. Yeah. Good. Lord. The Norwegian broadcasting orchestra performing seaward by advised FIFA

Bryden conducting was live in that next readings from secret insets monumental novel set in medieval Norway. Dr. Stan Love of Stockton. Your host from radio Norway is Arnie Ascot. The novel bears the name of the main character Christine the daughter. Grab it on your own self we own and passionate maiden who was around 40 dashing trackless chieftain and then needs to defy her father and wreckage in her own convictions. Disobedience is a central theme in Seagate and sets work and this theme permeates the great created you about Christine down to the minute details of the broad panorama of Norway's Middle Ages when the country was reckoned to be the most Catholic of all Rome's

provinces we're now going to read passages that relate to Christians. Atonement fast pilgrimage to the shrine of dissent all out in Need It was now the town of Khan I'm after the best conceived in sin. The reader is Pacho evolution. Kristen stood on Fagan's Bracha and saw the city lying below her in the golden light of the setting sun beyond the broad shining curves of the river. Les Brown houses with green turf groups dark domes of leaves in the gardens light stone houses with crenellated Gables churches that thrust up black shingle backs and churches with dully gleaming leaden roofs but above the green land above the fair city rose Christ's church so mighty and so radiantly bright that it was as though everything lay prostrate at its feet with the setting sun blazing full upon its front and on the shining

glass of its windows with towers and giddy spires and golden veins it stood pointing out into the clear summer heavens. Round about lay a countryside green with summer being big stately farms on its slopes beyond the fjord opened out bright in wide with drifting shadows from grapes llama clouds that were piling up over the shining blue mountains on the further side of the cloister home in the fjord Lo among lapping waves lay like a green Garland with stony white house flowers in it. So many ships masts out by the sand banks so many fair houses overcome sobbing the young woman flung herself down before the cross by the wayside where thousands of pilgrims had lain thanking God because helping hands were stretched out toward humankind on their journey through this fair and perilous world. The bells were ringing for vespers in churches and cloisters when Christian walk into Christ Church yard for a moment she dared to

steal a glance up at the church's west front then blinded. She cast down her eyes. Three times she walked around the church praying the solid mass of masonry with the Will doing riches of pillars and arches and windows glimpses of the enormous sloping surface of the roof of the tower. The gold of the spire high up in the firmament. Kristen sank under the burden of her sin. She trembled when she kissed the human stone of the portal. In a flash of lightning she saw the dark wood carvings around the church door at home but she had kissed with childish lips after her father and mother she sprinkle holy water over the child and herself thought of the time her father had done this when she was little with the child clasped tightly in her embrace. She went on up the church. She walked as though in a forest. The columns were furrowed like ancient trees and into the forest filled to the light mottled and clear as song through the stained glass windows high about her

beasts and men sported in the stone foliage and angels played and even dizzier Heights saw the vaulting lifting the church up to God in the hall that opened to one side. There was a service being held at an altar. Christine sank down on her knees by a pillar. The singing cut into her like a too strong light. Now she saw how low she lay in the dust high under the triumphal arch lifted over the people hung Christ the crucified the chaste virgin that was his mother stood gazing up in deathly anguish at her innocent son tortured to death like an evil doer. And here she knelt with the crew to her soon in her arms. She pressed the child to her. He was fresh as an apple red and white as a rose. He was awake now and lay looking up at her with his sweet clear eyes conceived in sin born under her hard evil heart torn from her sin polluted body so fair so sound so unspeakably lovely in fresh and pure. The undeserved mercy broke her heart asunder crushed with

repentance. She lay and the weeping welled up out of her soul like blood from a deadly blow. Knock knock me my child. God visited the sins of the parents upon the children. Did I not know that. R Yes I knew that but I had not the compassion in my heart for the innocent life that might be wakened in my womb to be a cursed and condemned to torment for my sins. Did I repent of my sin when I bore you within me my beloved beloved son. Oh no it was not repentance. My heart was hard with anger and evil thoughts in the hour when I first felt you stirring so tiny and defenseless. Oh yes now she knew it. She had thought that God was like her own father that Saint Olaf was like her own father. She had thought all the time deep in her heart that when her punishment grew heavier than she could bear then she would meet not with righteousness but with compassion. She was weeping so that she could not rise when the Pilgrim stood up during the service. She remained lying collapsed in a heap over her child. She looked up towards the

Claire story behind the Golden grated doors. St. Olaf shrine gleamed in the darkness towering high behind the altar and icy shudder ran through her. There lay his holy body awaiting the day of resurrection. Then the lid would fly open and he would rise with his axe in hand. He would stride down through this mighty church and up from the paved floor up from the mold out side up from every graveyard in Norway's land. The dead yellow skeletons would spring forth. They would be clothed with flesh and flocked to their king. Those who had striven to tread in his bloody trails and those who had only sought him that he might help them with the burdens of their sin and sorrow and sickness that here in life they had bound on themselves and their children. Now they throng around their Lord and prayed him to lay their needs before God. Lord hearken to my prayer for they spoke which I held so dear that I would rather suffer outlawry in need and hatred and death than that man or maid should

grow up in Norway and not know that you died for the salvation of all sinners. Lord you who bade us to go out and make all people your disciples with my blood. Did I Olof Harleston right your event GALIUM in the north tongue could be my poor fames. Kristen shut her eyes. Sick and dizzy. The king's countenance was before her his flaming I saw to the bottom of her soul. Now she trembled under sado laps glance. Do you understand now Kristen that you need help. Yes Lord King. Now I understand it. I sorely need your support that I may not turn from God again. Be with me now chieftain of his people when I bear forth my prayers and pray that I be granted mercy. Holy old love pray for me but conflict strife in Christine's life goes on. For all her honest repentance she still chooses to go her own

disastrous ways. And it's a little hard the end of her life that she is able to come to peace with nature and her God. After seeing how defeats and personal tragedies. Siggins has a novel closes in the shadow of the Black Death that swept over Europe in the middle of the 14th century. And Christine sets out on her second and last pilgrimage to this sanctuary are sent on life in need of course. So at last she was at her journeys and Kristen labyrinths daughter sat resting in a hay cart by the wayside below CM's board. The sun was shining and it was windy. The part of the meadow that had not yet been mown rippled red and silky bright with seeding grass only here into the log where the meadows read like this. Below the hero she caught a glimpse of the fjord dark blue and flecked with foam fresh white sea spray dashed up under the crags as far as she could see along the strand below the tree

covered commentary of the city. Kristen sighed deeply. All the same it was good to be here again. Good even though it was strange to know that she would never be going away from here any more. She drew up her hose and shoes and washed her feet in the brook into NIDA rose. She would walk barefoot. Behind on the path up the hill to the castle some boys were noisily carrying on. They were busy up under the gate trying to find a way into the decaying castle when they became aware of her. They started shouting indecent words down to her while they laughed and hooted they came bounding down the whole pack but they fell silent and wishing for when they saw it was an elderly woman in Pilgrim's garb and she did not scold him roundly for their coarse words but sat looking at them with big clear steady eyes and a secret smile on her lips. She had a round lean face with a broad forehead and a little rounded chin. She was sunburnt and quite wrinkled under their eyes but still she did not look so

exceedingly old. Then the boldest of the boys started talking and asking questions in order to hide the confusion of the flock. Christian felt like laughing. These boys seemed so like her own rascals. The twins when they were small though she hoped to God that hers had never been so foul mouth. These seem to be children of common folk in the town and when the moment came that she had been longing for all during her journey when she was standing under the crossing on Fagan's back and looking down the need arose. She could not collect her thoughts for prayer or meditation. All the bells of the city burst forth at the same moment to ring to vespers while the boys all spoke at once and wanted to point out everything she saw. Some of the boys followed her unbidden all the way into Christ Church and as she stood in the dim forest of pillars and gazed toward the candles in the gilding of the choir the boys plucked at the strange woman the whole time and wanted to show her all such things from the colored patches of light which the sun on the rose window threw in among the arches and the tombstones on the floor

to the canopies of costly steps about the altars. All such things as most catch the eyes of a child. Christian was given no peace in which to collect her thoughts but every word the boy said awaken the dull yearning in her heart for her sons first and foremost but also for the farm. The houses the cattle but the toil and the sway of motherhood. She was still loath to be recognized by any who had been her friends in bygone days. It was usually their custom to remain in their town houses during the festival and have guests staying with them. She dreaded the thought of running into a company of them. The next day was only last week long before knowns. People were streaming toward Christ Church bearing or supporting their sick and cripples in order that they might get a place for them to close to the shrine. When it was born out in procession next day after high mass as Kristen came up to the booths which had been set up by the fence around the church yard for the most part they saw food and drink wax candles and mats woven of rushes and birch twigs to lay beneath one on the church

floor. She stumbled upon the pilgrims from under and Kristen took the child while the young wife got herself a draft of ale. At the same moment a procession of the English pilgrims came by with songs and banners and lighted tapers. In the confusion that occurred when they made their way through the throngs of people jammed by the booths. She lost the pilgrims from under blue and was unable to find them again. For a long time she wanted him there instead there on the outskirts of the crowd yelling the shrieking child. When she laid face up to her neck and caressed it in order to comfort it it sought and sucked at her skin. She saw that it was thirsty and was at a loss what to do and seem futile to look for the mother. She must go down into the streets and ask question to get milk for it. But when she came out in a very long slit and would have gone northward there was again a great crush of people. Kristen was jostled into the nearest alley but here two riders and people on foot were rushing to the church and the throng became so great that at last she had to take refuge on a stone fence. The air above her head was

filled with the sounds of bells the Cathedral chimes were ringing the No-No Hora. The child stopped shrieking at the sound looked up at the sky and a gleam of understanding showed in his lusterless eyes. IT'S MY a little touched with pity. The old mother bent over and kissed the poor little mite. Then she saw that she was sitting on the stone wall around the hop garden of the Nikolaus house. Their old town manner she pressed the stranger woman's child to her breast and kissed it. Then someone touched her knee. A monk in the white habit and black hooded mantle of the preaching Friars. She looked down into a pale yellow furrowed old man's face a long emaciated mouth too deeply sunken amber eyes. It was good of her husband's brother. Now the child was crying again and before anything else she had to ask the monk if he could tell her where she could get some milk for it going to lead her around the church to the house of the preaching friars and got her some milk in a bowl while Kristen was feeding her foster

child. They talked to a get together about her husband and about the events leading up to his death. The first Nocturne had already begun when Kristen came into the church in the nave and around all the altars there was a throng of people. But one of the virgins who saw that she was had a most sickly child in her arms pushed her forward through the press until she was all the way in front among the cripples and the most infirm who were encamped in the middle of the church under the vault of the great dome in full view of the choir. Many hundreds of lights were burning in the church as the daylight edged out behind the panes of glass. The church grew warm with the smell of the burning wax. But after a while it was also filled with a sour stench from the rags of the sick and the poor. When the song of the choir soared under the vaulting and the organ pealed the cathedral filled with the noise of fruits and drums and string instruments. Kristen understood why the church might be called a ship in that mighty House of Stone. All these people seemed to be on board a vessel and the singing was like the roar of the sea on which it was born.

At intervals it subsided as in a calm and a single man's voice were the lesson out over the listening throng. The meeting with her husband's brother had shaken her strangely more so as every step on the way here had brought her closer and closer home to the memory of a dead man she had thought little about him these last years while he worked for her growing sons gave her little time to remember her own fate. Nonetheless the thought of him had always been as it were close behind her only that she had not had the time to turn to it. Now she seemed to see her soul as it had been in these years it had lived as people live on the farms during the busy summer half year when they moved out of the great hall and dwell in the storehouse loft. But all day long they go to and fro past the window hole never thinking of going in even though they have but to lay a hand on the latch and pushed open a door. And when at last one day they have an errand in there. The House has grown strange an almost solemn because of the air of loneliness and quiet that has come over it. But while she had been speaking with a man who was the last

living witness to the interplay between seedtime and harvest in her life with her husband it seemed to her that she had come to look out over her life in a new way and seeing things in this new way. She had suddenly found words that swept away both her bitterness against Erlend and her tears for his soul worn off by sudden death. He had never borne malice to anyone. She saw it now and God had seen it always. So at last she had come so far that she deemed she could look at her own life as from the uppermost cleft of a glen. Now her road led down into the valley of a shadow. But first she had been given grace to understand that in the solitude of the cloister and at the gates of death there awaited her one who had always beheld the life of mankind in the way the parishes of man appear from a vantage point on the mountain. He had seen the Stan and sorrow the love and hate in the hearts of men as one sees the rich farms and the humble carts the teeming fields of grain and the abandoned waste. All born on the same countryside. And he had descended

his feet had trodden the people Lance stood in the palaces and in the huts he had gathered up the sorrows and sins of the rich and the poor and lifted them aloft with him upon a cross not my happiness and my pride but my sin and my sorrow. Oh my sweet lord. She looked up to where the crucifix stood uplifted busily high over the triumphal arch. While the morning scene lit up the many colored panes deep among the pillars of the choir. And the glory as of red and brown and green in blue gems dimmed the blaze of light from the altar and from the golden shrine behind Crystal listening to the last vigil the madness she knew that the lessons in this service told of God's healing miracles through the power about save to his faithful knight King all of Haralson she lifted the 6 train your child up towards the choir and prayed for it. But she was so frozen after a long vigil in the cold of the church that her teeth were chattering and she felt faint from fasting. The smell of so many people and the sickening fumes

of the sick and the poor mingled with the smoke of the wax candles and sank down in a heavy strangely greasy and clammy cloud over the people kneeling on the floor. Cold in the cold morning but fat and cheerful and kind countrywoman who had sat dozing and nodding a little against the foot of the pillar just behind them with the bare skin under her and another over her lame legs. I walk now and drew Kristen's weary head down upon her wide lap. Rest a bit now sister. You need it I dare say. Kristen slept in a strange woman's lap and dreamed she stepped over the threshold into her home. She was young and unwed for she saw her own thick brown plats which hung down over her shoulders. She was in company with Maryland where he had just straightened himself up after going through the doorway before her by the hearth her father said binding arrowheads on the shafts. He had his lap full and a bunches of sinew thread and on either side of him on the bench lay piles of arrowheads and sharpened shafts just as they stepped in. He bent forward over the heap of embers and was

going to take the little three legged metal cup that he always used to melt resin in. But suddenly he jerked back his hand shook it in the air and then he stuck his burnt fingertips in his mouth and sucked on them while he turned his head towards her and Erlend and looked up at them with a wrinkled brow and a smile about his lips. Then she awoke with her face wet with tears. She kneeled to the high mass when the archbishop himself officiated at the high altar. The clouds of incense rolled through the echoing church with the many colored rays of sunlight now mingled with the glare of wax candles. This fresh spicy scent of incense spread abroad. And overcame the smell of poverty and sickness with a heart filled overflowing with compassion for the flock of the infirm and needy in whose mixed God had put her. She prayed in a rush of sisterly tenderness for all who were poor as she and who suffered as she herself had suffered. I will rise and go home to my father selections from Sigurd onsets novel Kristen the life of stop you read by Patti

Shaw Eva's son. To conclude this program of Norwegian sketches the composition by beyond the armed cold. Congratulations Lena wage and broadcasting orchestra on the direction of even better. Thank. You. First. Up. At. The end. Of. The book. The x. Was a

a pillow M. Was. Yeah I am. I am at. The end. At. The end. And. I am. Yet. Going to be.

OK. Or am. I out. I am the actor. Yeah I am. Going to out ye. Ye at. Yeah. A A A. A A. Good luck.

Leno agent broadcasting orchestra performing. Congratulations by concluding this program of Norwegians that. This program was carried at the University of Michigan by Marianne Woodson technical supervision by Robert broke. The. Law in. The.

Us. This is Greg. Join us again. This is an easy on the national educational radio network.