But who was she, this woman who gave birth on a slave-ship and returned ten years later without her children? With the help of Helga Hallbergsdóttir, curator of the Sagnheimar Folk Museum on Heimaey and indefatigable genealogist, I was able to establish that Ásta Þorsteinsdóttir, born in Mosfell, was the niece of the island’s slaughtered poet-priest, Jón Þorsteinsson, and was the second wife of Ólafur Egilsson. He already had a daughter, Þorgerður, whose husband Gísli returned to Heimaey to take over the priestly duties after the raid. Ásta and Ólafur had an elder daughter, Helga, who was not captured with them. The couple had two years together on Ásta’s return, before Ólafur died on 1 March 1639. Ásta herself died in 1669 in Snjallsteinshöfði on the mainland, where Helga was living with her husband Finnur Guðmundsson. A fragment of inscribed stone, all that remains of Ásta’s gravestone, has been moved to a museum in Skógar on the south coast.
But what happened to Ásta in Algiers and after she returned to Iceland? What was she like, this woman who grew up among educated men? What did she think, what did she dream about, what made her laugh, how did the mind of a woman from a small, homogeneous society react to finding herself in one of the most heterogeneous societies on earth, how was the stern religious faith she grew up with affected, how did she deal with the mental agony over her children, why did she return without them, what happened to her marriage? History can tell us no more than it does about almost any woman of the time in Iceland or anywhere else, unless she happened to be a queen.
Joyfully, I appropriated the freedoms of fiction to feel my way into these long-ago lives, and in doing so to explore the role of story itself in helping us all to find ways to survive. While I have done my best to make it historically authentic, this remains emphatically a work of imagination, coloured by the present as well as the past.
Ásta and Ólafur did live in Iceland in the places described in this novel, as did Jón Þorsteinsson and his wife Margrét, whose son Jón did become a corsair nicknamed Jón Vestmann and ransomed his mother, described in at least one source as being in chains. Jón Vestmann himself had an eventful life as a pirate captain and leader of many raids. He returned at last to Copenhagen, where he had to make public atonement for abandoning his faith and undergoing circumcision, and died there in 1649. Anna Jasparsdóttir, the wife of wealthy Jón Oddsson, did indeed convert to Islam and marry the Moor Jus Hamet, and was vilified for it back home. Young Jón Ásbjarnarson did rise in the Algiers civil service. An envoy by the name of Wilhelm Kifft did organise the ransom of thirty-four Icelanders, and the Dutch entry in his accounts concerning Ásta’s purchase is exactly as quoted in his gamely spelled ledger. This is the only unequivocal mention I have been able to unearth of Ásta’s owner. I have drawn for some aspects of Cilleby on reports about the fantastically wealthy corsair leader Ali Pichilin, owner of six or seven hundred slaves, two palaces, his own mosque and a fleet of galleys, a man noted for his intelligence and his taste for debating with Christians. Einar Loftsson did lose his wife, and indeed his nose and ears, according to an autobiographical account referred to in other sources, and managed to purchase his own ransom. Guðríður Símonardóttir, from whom has survived a tantalising fragment of a letter sent home from Algiers to her husband Eyjólfur, did fall for Hallgrímur Pétursson when the trainee priest was refreshing the faith of the returning hostages in the winter of 1636–7, and Eyjólfur, who had a number of illegitimate children by then, was among those drowned in a terrible accident at sea, just in time to save the lovers from harsh punishment. Hallgrímur went on to become Iceland’s most revered hymnwriter, his name remembered in Reykjavík’s fine Hallgrímskirkja cathedral. Their love story has been re-imagined by Steinunn Jóhannesdóttir in her novel, Reisubók Guðríðar Símonardóttur, also available in Norwegian, German and French. I am delighted to record here Steinunn’s generosity in sharing her own considerable research and patiently answering my questions.
Ólafur Egilsson tells us that on his return to Iceland he did visit the Bishop of Skálholt, who at that time was Oddur Einarsson. I have imagined Ólafur’s subsequent visit to Skálholt at a time when the new bishop, Gísli Oddsson, is known to have been struggling with the implications of carrying out the king’s wish to begin raising a ransom. There is no historical evidence that Ólafur threw himself into the fundraising efforts, but it seems to me most likely.
Murat Reis aka Jan Janszoon from Haarlem had a long career as a corsair admiral, moving freely between bases in Salé and Algiers, and is thought to have masterminded the raid on Iceland.
This is a fascinating period in European and North African history, which deserves more attention. I am grateful to Professor Þorsteinn Helgason, who has been a most encouraging historical mentor, and commend his forthcoming book, The Extreme Point: The Turkish Raid in Iceland 1627, which he kindly made available to me in manuscript form.
As well as being little known in Europe, this is a period in Algerian history to which that nation’s own scholars are only just beginning to turn their attention. I am grateful to academic and author Dr Linda Belabdelouahab Fernini of the University of M’Sila for her time and insights, and to writer Med Megani. Special thanks to Said Chitour, personal guide par excellence, who led me patiently around what remains of Algiers’ precipitous Casbah area, where the captive people of so many nations lived, died, suffered, made shift, used their ingenuity, recanted their faith or held on to it, waited for ransoms that sometimes came and sometimes did not, and in a not insignificant number of cases made interesting new lives for themselves.
Heimaey, only inhabited island of the volcanic Vestmannaeyjar archipelago (which has expanded since the seventeenth century and now boasts a fifteenth island, Surtsey, which exploded out of the sea in 1963) is the most welcoming of islands. Huge thanks to Magnús and Adda, who put me up at the wonderful Hótel Vestmannaeyjar and kept me right on puffins. And to the aforementioned Helga Hallbergsdóttir in the folk museum, who devoted many hours to sharing her own insights with me. Also to Kristín Jóhannsdóttir at the island’s Eldheimar Museum up the road, which is dedicated to the dramatic volcanic eruption of 1973 (when, it might be noted, the sealwoman’s dream came true at last).
Thanks also to Páll Zóphóníasson and Páll Magnússon, to Ragnheiður Erla Bjarnadóttir, who advised me on early seventeenth-century church life and buildings in Iceland, and to my willing translators of ancient papers: Jan Zuidema in Holland, Joakim Pitt-Winther in Denmark and Sigurjón Jóhannsson in Reykjavík. Also to my old friends, Marta Guðjónsdóttir, Ragnheidur Guðjónsdóttir and Kjartan Gunnar Kjartansson, who accompanied me all over south Iceland hunting down historical locations.
To Two Roads publisher Lisa Highton, who patiently encouraged a novice novelist to find her feet and her voice, Federico Andornino, editors Helen Coyle and Amber Burlinson, cover artist Joe Wilson and designer Sara Marafini, the great team at Two Roads and John Murray Press, and Jenny Brown, most encouraging and indefatigable of agents – thank you all. I’ve been awed by your skills and support.
Most of all I want to thank former Icelandic president Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, who once upon a time drove a young woman around Iceland in a blue Volvo and helped her to see trolls in the lava and hidden people in the rocks and sealfolk dancing on the beach at midnight. And my late father, Magnus Magnusson, who introduced me to the sagas and told me about the most famous question of them all.
Acknowledgements
The quotations from Reverend Ólafur Egilsson’s memoir preceding each section are taken, with thanks, from The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson: Captured by Pirates in 1627, translated and edited by Karl Smári Hreinsson and Adam Nichols, Fjölvi, Reykjavík, 2008. An updated edition was published in 2016.
The tales about the origins of the hidden people in the unwashed children of Eve and the Girl at the Shieling can be found in Ísklenzkar Þjóðsögur og Æfintýri (Icelandic Folklore and Legends), a large body of traditional tales collected by Jón Árnason and Magnús Grímsson, fir
st published by Jón Árnason in Leipzig in 1862 and 1864. I have made free with a number of different English translations, notably by Jacqueline Simpson, J.M. Bedell and May and Hallberg Hallmundsson.
The version of Laxdæla Saga I relied on was the 1969 Penguin translation by Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Pálsson. The four lines from the tenth-century Sonatorrek of Egill Skallagrímsson, a skaldic poem lamenting the deaths of two of his sons, is from the translation of Egil’s Saga by Hermann Pálsson and Paul Edwards, 1976, also Penguin. For the story of Sympathy the Learned I am indebted to an English version by Powys Mathers of The Book of the Thousand Nights and One from the French translation by Joseph Charles Mardrus, London, 1923.
About the Author
Broadcaster and journalist Sally Magnusson has written 10 books, most famously her Sunday Times bestseller Where Memories Go (Two Roads, 2014) about her mother’s dementia.
Half-Icelandic, half-Scottish, Sally has inherited a rich storytelling tradition.
The Sealwoman’s Gift is her first novel.
The Sealwoman's Gift Page 29