Lodge Members in Festive Bunads

Sigrid Undset Lodge #32 meets at 9:30 AM on the third Saturday of most months (on vacation in July and August) in Brown Hall at Grace Lutheran Church, 3149 Waverley St (at the Corner of Loma Verde) in Palo Alto, California. Palo Alto is the home of Stanford University and conveniently located between San Francisco and San Jose. A monthly program follows the lodge's hour-long business meeting, and refreshments are served. Members enjoy: food demonstrations; music and dance performances; craft projects and demonstrations; and talks on art, contemporary issues, folklore, history, genealogy, language, and literature.

Santa Lucia Procession, Lodge's Annual Julefest

The members of Sigrid Undset Lodge invite all interested parties to join them at one of their meetings or stop by their booth at Norway Days on first weekend of May in San Francisco. For more up-to-date information contact the lodge.

Sigrid Undset Lodge was founded on February 21, 1987 in Palo Alto, California. It is named after the Norwegian author, Sigrid Undset, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1928 for her historical novels of life in medieval Norway. The best known of these major works is the thousand page trilogy Kristin Lavransdatter . The three books of the trilogy, The Bridal Wreath (The Garland), The Mistress of Husaby (The Wife), and The Cross, are published separately or in a single volume. Currently, this novel is available in two English translations—the 1930 version and the more recent one by Tiina Nunnally. Kristin Lavransdatter was made into a movie by Norwegian film star and director Liv Ullmann. Sigrid's other historical novel cited by the Nobel Prize committee is the four-volume series, The Master of Hestviken, which is also available in an English translation.

Sigrid Undset 1882-1949

Sigrid Undset was born in 1882 in Kalundborg, Denmark, but was raised in Norway. Her archaeologist father died when she was 11, and her mother struggled to raise her three daughters. Sigrid was employed as an office worker at a young age, and began her writing career with several successful novels of women in contemporary Norway, the best known of which is Jenny.

She married Anders Castus Svarstad in 1912, a Norwegian painter whom she had met in Rome, and they had three children. She struggled to write while tending to her family and running a large household. In 1919, she moved to Lillehammer, Norway and built a large, beautiful house, Bjerkebæk. In this comfortable place she began studying and writing her medieval sagas. Her studies of the medieval church motivated her to convert to Catholicism. It was during this time her marriage ended.

When Germany invaded Norway in 1940, she was forced to flee to Sweden, and later to the United States. She supported her country’s cause with speeches and writing during the war years. She returned to Norway exhausted in 1945 still devastated by World War II memories—the loss of her elder son and the occupation of her home by the Germans. She lived until 1949, but wrote no more. For additional information about Sigrid Undset’s life, see her “official” biography on Odin, and read about her Nobel honor on the Nobel Prize web site.