She was raised in Oslo, and during World War II she was interested in the Soviet Union and the Russian language.
She started on studies of Slavic languages after the war, and graduated at the University of Oslo in 1958 with a thesis on Peter the Great s pronunciation of Russian.
In 1971 she was appointed professor of Slavic languages and the successor of Christian Schweigaard Stang.
[2] Sverdrup Lunden helped to modernize the study of Russian at the University of Oslo, who had previously been focused on historical linguistics.
However, she was interested in the old Russian, and in 1987 she published a Norwegian translation of Slovo o polku Igoreve.