Sigrid Undset, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1928, is without question one of Norway’s most famous and influential novelists. That she became her country’s first female Nobel laureate “principally for her powerful descriptions of Northern life during the Middle Ages” seems a natural consequence of her upbringing.1 Her father, an archaeologist working at the Museum of Antiquities in Oslo, introduced her at a young age to the material and literary worlds of the Middle Ages.2 Her mother, who homeschooled her until she was eight, taught her Scandinavian folktales and Danish history, and at the age of ten, during a visit to her father’s family in Trøndelag, Undset read the Old Norse-Icelandic epic Njáls saga, which she later referred to as “A Book that was a Turning Point in my Life.”