Iceland's bestselling book on the woman who escaped pirates
Steinunn Johannesdottir holding her book Reisubók Guðríður Símonardóttir (meaning “The Travels of Guðríður Símonardóttir,” translated in French as “L’esclave Islandaise”). Photo by Julia Duin.
REYKJAVIK, Iceland — She used to be an actress, interpreting the personalities of famed Icelanders. And then Steinunn Johannesdottir played the part of Guðríður Símonardóttir, the wife of Iceland’s most famous poet, Hallgrímur Pétursson. Guðríður’s dramatic life so moved the actress that she began writing a novel about her.
Pétursson is most famous for his Passion Hymns, still sung in Icelandic churches every Good Friday. The 17th century Lutheran pastor helped rehabilitate his wife after she was kidnapped by Muslim pirates from a beach near her home and sent to the harems of Algiers.
Johannesdottir’s book about this couple, Reisubók Guðríður Símonardóttir (“The Travels of Guðríður Símonardóttir”), released in Icelandic in 2002 and became a national best seller. It was set to be translated into English until the 9/11 terrorist attack in New York. Publishers seemed hesitant to publish about the Turkish raids of the 1600’s, where Barbary pirates captured thousands of Europeans as slaves and forced many to convert to Islam. The term “barbary” came from the Greek and Arabic for barbarians and barbaric and refers to the coastline of modern-day Morocco, Tunisia, Libya and Algeria, from which the pirates attacked Mediterranean and North Atlantic coastal cities, eventually sparking the Barbary Wars of the 19th century.
The book has since been translated into German, French and Norwegian. After 19 years, Johannesdottir, now 71, wants English readers to have access to her research and stories of victims.
I looked her up during a recent visit to Iceland and we agreed to meet at her home on a side street near the vast, rocket-shaped Hallgrímskirkja church that overlooks Reykjavik. As we sat at the dining table by her white-tiled kitchen, she served me coffee with sugar cubes and told me how a New York filmmaker had contacted her about her book but vanished after 9/11.
“So many people have wanted me to make a film or TV series about this,” she sighed, “but the subject matter is so delicate.”
The love story of Guðríður and Hallgrímur started in July 1627 when 400 people – 1 percent of the country’s population at the time – disappeared. The pirates kidnapped Icelanders from three coastal areas, with the Westman islands to the south getting hit the worst with some 242 people taken away on slave ships and several dozen killed.
“The attack on Iceland was made in a period when the Turkish imperium still was widespread and powerful and Algiers was the seat of the most renowned, cruelest and richest corsairs [pirates] on the North African coastline,” she told me. “The victims of their most successful raid against the Christians happened to be poor and defenseless people far away in the North Atlantic. But in spite of their poor living conditions, many of them could read and write and that´s why the Turkish Raid in Iceland became so extremely well documented.”
Icelanders have never fully recovered from this trauma. When a Scottish zoologist came to the Westman islands in 1898, he reported that the “Turkish Raid” was still being referred to daily by the locals 270 years after the event.
Some of these details were retold in the 2003 movie “Atlantic Jihad,” in which Olafur Ragnar Grimsson, then the president of Iceland, said that his countrymen forgave the invaders. Still, the kidnappings and killings remain engraved in the memories of this island people.
The Ottoman empire was in full flower in the early 17th century and those who were part of it were simply referred to as the “Turks.” Specifically, they were from Algiers, the capital of Algeria, and Salé, Morocco. The Icelandic raid is believed to be the furthest the pirates captured slaves from. They ravaged other coasts, like the Faroe Islands in 1629, leaving 300 dead in their wake, and Ireland in 1631, as well as towns all over the Mediterranean and western coasts of Spain, England and France. By the 1650s, there were 30,000 prisoners from coastal lands all over Europe in Algiers alone.
Catching Christian prisoners was financially rewarding to the pirates, who could sell them as slaves in North Africa. Some of the hostages were freed by the Turks for ransom money. One Lutheran pastor was sent back from Algiers but had to leave his son behind. He could free his wife but never saw his children again. The Danish, who ruled Iceland at the time, didn’t have the money in the 17th century to go to war against the Moroccans.
“Immediately after the raid, people started to make reports on it, write petitions to the authorities in Denmark, letters to their families and so on and ask for help and release,” Johannesdottir said. “That was what fascinated me. And I wanted to describe the destiny of an Icelandic woman, a young mother, who suddenly was thrown into the center of a war-like conflict she didn´t understand, with all the violence, horrors and sorrows that follow.”
As one of the hapless 400, Guðríður spent nine years in what’s now Algiers before the Danish government finally came up with ransom money for 35 Icelanders, eight Norwegians and seven Danes. The other captives had either died, were made slaves on the galley ships or were sent to harems.
I was struck by this horrific story and how little of it is known today. Americans probably don’t know that one of the first things the fledgling U.S. Navy did in the 1790s was to build six ships that were used to send the U.S. Marines to North African shores to defeat the Barbary pirates. The phrase “to the shores of Tripoli” in the Marine Corps Hymn refers to that time. Europeans know this story better. In 1575, Miguel de Cervantes, a Spanish soldier, was returning to Spain after fighting in the battle of Lepanto when pirates captured his ship and took him to Algiers, where he remained a prisoner for five years. After his family and an order of monks raised funds for his ransom, he returned to Spain where 25 years later, he published Don Quixote.
When prisoners were ransomed, it was assumed that they had been deprived of Christian teaching for many years, and thus needed to be recatechized. Guðríður was a fisherman’s wife when she was captured with her 4-year-old son.
She wrote one letter to her husband, Eyjólfur Sölmundsson, while in captivity that reached him in 1635. She was ransomed in June 1636 but had to leave her son behind in Algiers. Children of captives were forced to convert to Islam, and by doing so, lost all right of return.
Guðríður intended to move back to the Westman islands to rebuild her life. She didn’t know that her husband had considered her dead then remarried, had several more children, and perished in a shipwreck. Guðríður and a group of captives took two months to make their way through Europe through France, starting in Marseille, then walking or riding past the medieval cities of Narbonne, Carcassonne, Toulouse and Bordeaux, eventually ending up in Copenhagen to await a ship to Iceland.
Meanwhile, Hallgrímur Pétursson was a promising candidate for the Lutheran ministry who was studying in Copenhagen at the time. He was assigned to assist the former prisoners but fell in love with Guðríður, who was 16 years his senior. She became pregnant with his child and he was sent back to Iceland in disgrace. The couple eventually married and had two more children. One daughter died around the age of 3 and her father grieved her loss the rest of his life.
Years later, he felt much remorse over the less-than-sanctified way his relationship with Guðríður had begun and he began composing the series of 50 songs known as the Passion Hymns. They reflect deep sorrow and terror at the thought of his many sins and meditatively trace Christ’s journey from the Garden of Gethsemane to him being laid in the tomb. Last is “Death’s Uncertain Hour,” which has become a staple at Icelandic funerals. Completed in 1659 and published in 1666, the hymns caught on fast, as there was nothing like it in Icelandic literature at the time. The themes of suffering, dark, cold and death connected with the Icelanders who lived far away from the comforts of Europe and were ravaged by volcanoes, famine and at least two bouts of the Plague during that era. They became not only the highest form of Icelandic literature in that century but some of the greatest Icelandic poetry ever written. To this day, they are read out loud every Good Friday at churches in Iceland.
“For 300 years, he was our psychologist,” Johannesdottir said of Pétursson. “He understood our griefs. The Passion Hymns were one of the few things that people could read.”
The couple did not have an easy life. Pétursson died Oct. 27, 1674, of leprosy. The oldest son died a few years later and Guðríður outlived them all, finally dying on Dec. 18, 1682 at the age of 84. But their life story has continued to capture the hearts of Icelanders.
“She stayed for nine years as a slave in a Muslim society, managed to get released and come back home and start a new life as a wife of the greatest genius of the 17th century in Iceland.”
“Both of them have a unique position in the Icelandic history,” she said. “He is one of the greatest poets in our literary history. She was one of the best-known victims of the Turkish Raid. She stayed for nine years as a slave in a Muslim society, managed to get released and come back home and start a new life as a wife of the greatest genius of the 17th century in Iceland.”
The making of Reisubók Guðríður Símonardóttir took several years. In 1995, Johannesdottir was asked to write a new play about Guðríður for the Festival of Sacred Arts in Hallgrímskirkja. Called “The World of Guðríður – Guðríður Símonardóttir´s Last Visit to the Church of Hallgrímur,” Johnannesdottir was the playwright, stage director and producer for the production and it was during that time she decided to write a historical novel about the 17th century woman. First, she plunged herself into documents about the raid that are stored at the National Library of Iceland in Reykjavik. She noticed that while there were copious details in the documents about the atrocities the pirates committed, there was little about what happened to the kidnapped Icelanders after they were forced onto pirate ships. She decided she would physically retrace the captives’ steps as much as she possibly could.
Steinunn Johnannesdottir leaning towards the statue of Christian IV, the king of Denmark and Iceland in the first half of 17th century, in Glückstadt, Germany in summer 1998. Photo courtesy of Johnannesdottir.
By the time she began traveling in 1996, Algeria was in the throes of a civil war and not accessible to tourists. So Johannesdottir and her husband, Einar Karl Haraldsson, first traveled to Morocco, which is where the hostages were first brought to the city of Salé, near the present-day capital of Rabat. They were sold on the slave market, often ending up in Algiers.
Then the couple went to Europe, retracing the steps of the freed hostages, who traversed the continent in the summer of 1636. They ended up in the Netherlands in Haarlem, where the leader of the Turkish Raid, Jan Janszoon, also known as Murat Reis, was from. And it was another Dutchman, Wilhielm Kifft, who represented the Danish king in bargaining for the hostages to be returned. The author eventually ended up in Paris, where she spent two months combing through documents at L´Institut du Monde Arabe, in which were eyewitness accounts from captives in 17th century Algiers. Those accounts, she told me, were invaluable in terms of cobbling together a story of what Guðríður’s nine years in captivity must have looked like.
Adam Nichols, an associate English professor at the University of Maryland and the author of a related book on the Turkish raids, The Travels of Reverend Olafur Egilsson: The Story of the Barbary Corsair Raid on Iceland in 1627, thinks there’s definitely a market these days for books on the pirates, not to mention a historical romance like that of Guðríður and Hallgrímur.
“So many astonishing events took place during the three centuries or so that Barbary corsairs hunted the seas, and there's so much 'human interest' stuff there, that there's a lot of potential for some very powerful storytelling,” Nichols wrote to me. “And, as we all know, everybody loves a good story.”
He's also researching a biography of Jan Janszoon, the renegade Dutchman-turned-corsair who gave up his family and religion for a life as a Barbary pirate.
Johannesdottir says the English-speaking world will find these stories compelling.
“That´s why I’m still hoping that someday “The Travels of Guðríður Símonardóttir” will be translated into English and published in England or the U.S.,” she said. “It is an important book for a better knowledge of the old and ongoing conflict between Western and Muslim countries. The Turkish Raid of 1627 is a part of a broader history of a conflict that stretches all the way from North Africa to the North Atlantic.”
Julia Duin is a veteran journalist who has worked as an editor or reporter for five newspapers, has published six books and has master’s degrees in journalism and religion. She currently freelances out of Seattle for the Seattle Times, Washington Post and other outlets.