4 ideas
Widowed and living as a lay sister at Rein convent during the Black Death, the aging Kristin stops local peasants from burying a small boy alive as a sacrifice to end the plague. She then carries a dead plague victim's body to burial herself and gives her gold wedding ring to pay for masses, catches the plague, and dies.
Kristin breaks her betrothal to Simon Darre and deceives her beloved father to marry Erlend, even wearing the virgin's bridal crown while secretly pregnant. The novel shows that the cost of such a choice arrives slowly, as decades of guilt and scrupulous penance rather than as one catastrophe. The person who insisted on the choice keeps paying for it by holding herself, and the partner she chose, answerable for everything that follows.
Kristin loves Erlend but keeps an inner account of his carelessness: his earlier children with Eline, the failed conspiracy that costs them Husaby, and his neglect of their sons. She reopens that account in every quarrel.
Kristin's fierce self-accusation and religious scruples keep her at the center of her own moral story. They also let her judge others while seeming to judge herself. The novel treats this as a form of pride: repentance that stays self-focused blocks grace, and her surrender comes only when she acts for others without calculation at the very end.