The Master of Hestviken, Volume II: The Snake Pit

The Master of Hestviken tetralogy, set in thirteenth-century Norway, is the story of Olav Audunsson, a man whose life is a chronicle of conflict: between the brutal facts of the fading pagan order and the ascendant light of Christianity, between violence and peace, fidelity and betrayal, transgression and redemption. The Snake Pit follows Olav and Ingunn as they return to Olav’s ancestral home of Hestviken.

There, under the weight of past sins, the tragic loss of children, and the persistence of suffering in body and temptation in spirit, their marriage begins to flounder. For Olav, life now resembles the image carved upon his doorpost: the legend of Gunnar, who charmed all the snakes who threatened him, save one―which bit him to the heart.

Wrestling his own serpents, Olav must muster the will to name and renounce the one with the power to kill body and soul alike.

Considered by Undset to be her best work―surpassing even Kristin Lavransdatter, inspiration for her Nobel Prize in Literature―The Master of Hestviken captures the manners, morals, and spirit of its age, firmly grasping the basic realities of human character and history and creating a protagonist and a world of intense reality.

Hailed as a triumph of fiction, The Master of Hestviken typifies Undset’s talent for seeing far into past and future alike and rendering “both the darkness which lies before them and the way through to the light beyond.”