The Sealwoman’s Gift by Sally Magnusson is a fictional account of the abduction of 242 Icelanders from Vestmannaeyjar by moorish invaders in 1627. I was familiar with the story as I had read the memoir of one of the men who was captured, The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson: Captured by Pirates in 1627. In fact, Magnusson made Ólafur and his wife Ásta the protagonists in this story. The author used the memoir as an integral source as she recounted episodes told by the reverend, yet in more agonizing detail. For example, Ásta was nine months pregnant and gave birth aboard the ship eleven days after being abducted. Magnusson wrote about the agony of going into labour on a moving vessel, without having anything, not even fresh water, that might ease her pain.
The ship eventually made its way to Algiers, where the Icelanders were disembarked. Some died en route, but the Egilsson family was intact. Ólafur’s memoir serves as a valuable record of the most intricate details about daily life in Iceland and what he encountered as a slave in Algiers. Magnusson used this characteristic for what may have been looked on–at the time–as pedantry to portray Ólafur as a bit too interested in his new life in captivity. Much to the annoyance of his wife and others around him, they’d rather he concentrate on other matters instead of verb conjugations in Arabic. I had a laugh at this remark by Sa’id Suleiman, an Ottoman janissary, about Ólafur, after the abduction while sailing to Algiers:
“Mind you, if he [Sa’id] is interrogated by that priest one more time about the length of his sash or, God help him, how the future tense is conjugated in the common tongue, the man is going straight over the side.”
After four weeks his captors send Ólafur on a mission to Copenhagen to plead with King Christian IV for money to pay the Icelanders’ ransom. This was a mission that dragged on for years. At first the king wasn’t all bothered by the loss of his Icelandic citizens, and, moreover, there was no money to pay the ransom anyway. In an example of seventeenth-century crowdfunding, Ólafur rallied his countrymen from all over Iceland to work harder to raise the funds. Women knitted more mittens to sell, and people worked longer hours at their jobs (fishing, smithing) to generate more product.
While Ólafur was away, Ásta remained in Algiers where over the next decade she lost all her children. They didn’t die, but one by one they were removed from their compound to serve other slaveowners, or, in one case, her ten-year-old Marta was taken to serve as a concubine. Magnusson portrayed the absolute helplessness that any mother would feel in this situation. In spite of these losses Ásta is not a weak and subservient individual. Granted, she is a slave, but she has a mouth on her that–as others tell her all the time–would get anyone else killed. All it would take is for her owner, Cilleby, to have had enough of her cheek and he could sentence her to death on the spot.
After nine years ransom was paid for 34 Icelanders. They took a circuitous route back to Iceland via Copenhagen, where they had to overwinter. Six died during the journey. The reunion between Ólafur and Ásta was not as rosy as a TV movie would make it out to be. Magnusson portrayed it as two strangers seeing one another again where neither gives the other too much notice. The couple never slept together after they were reunited. So many other abductees decided to spend the rest of their lives in Algiers, converted to Islam from Christianity, settling for their new way of life. During Ásta’s time back in Iceland she curses the cold and damp weather, the eternal feeling of having wet feet, the limited food supply and poor living conditions. She argues with Ólafur, who is a reverend after all, about how could it have been God’s plan to remove her from her home for nine years and force her to part with all four of her children. The chapters devoted to the reunion of the couple were the most heartbreaking. Without any ballistic arguments, Ólafur and Ásta realize that life might have been better for them both if they never reunited. They never admit this to one another; it is unspoken but obvious to the reader. Ólafur was 63 at the time of the abduction and the stress of the last nine years couldn’t have been easy on him. He died a mere two years after Ásta came back.
As a fictional account, fleshed out of a four hundred-year-old memoir, Magnusson succeeded in creating a work that seemed true to life. Ólafur’s memoir is entirely his own story but The Sealwoman’s Gift spends nine years with Ásta and what she had to endure while her husband was away trying to secure her freedom.