The Sealwoman's Gift

by Sally Magnusson

Genres: Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology; Historical Fiction; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

The debut novel set in 17th century Iceland by Sunday Times bestselling author and broadcaster Sally Magnusson.

There is a true incident in Icelandic history little known outside their culture. In 1627, Barbary pirates raided an island off the Iceland coast—and abducted 250 inhabitants into slavery in Algiers. Among them was a pastor, his wife and their three children. The pastor was sent back on a failed mission to seek ransom and wrote an account of his adventures. But what happened to the islanders? Most importantly, what happened to his wife and family?

Barely a handful of facts is known about Ásta, his wife. How did she survive these terrible events? It's Ásta's space that the author has filled with her stunning novel of love and loss: she has given voice to a woman who, to all intents and purposes (like so many women in history), had none at all. Yet she was clearly remarkable. Captive in an alien Arab culture, the pastor's wife met the unravelling of her identity and beliefs and the least bearable of losses—her three children—with the one thing she brought from home: the stories in her head, like an Icelandic Scheherazade.

Intensely moving, The Sealwoman's Gift pays tribute to the fundamental power of storytelling in our lives, our ability to survive loss and tragedy and the real meaning of love.

Release date: February 8, 2018

Publisher: John Murray Press

Print pages: 384

Sample

The Turkish Raid, or Tyrkjaránið was one of the most traumatic events in the history of Iceland. Within a matter of days in the summer of 1627, corsairs from Algiers and from Salé in Morocco raided a number of coastal regions, killing dozens and carrying at least four hundred people back to North Africa, where they were sold into slavery.

Iceland’s experience was far from unique: several Mediterranean states (no slouches in the piracy business themselves) lost many thousands of their citizens to the thriving slave-economy of Algiers. It was a time when slavery was being practised across the world and the mass transport of Africans to the New World was just beginning: the first African slaves were brought to Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619. In Algiers there were captives from all over England (four hundred listed in 1669), from Wales, Scotland and Ireland. Most of those were snatched at sea, although a raid on Baltimore in West Cork in 1631, also led by the corsair admiral Murat Reis, carried off one hundred and seven men, women and children from their homes in an attack very similar to the one on Iceland. Ransoms were being raised for hostages right across Europe, with religious orders in Italy, Spain and France doing much of the fundraising and negotiating, while English governments preferred to explore military options.

But relative to its size, Iceland, the furthest north the corsairs reached, was hit particularly hard. To lose four hundred people out of a population of around forty thousand – including most of the island of Heimaey – is by any standards a stupendous national tragedy, particularly for what was at the time the poorest country in Europe. That may be one reason why Iceland has kept painfully in its collective psyche what has largely faded from the memory of other affected nations. It may also be down to the Icelandic compulsion to write. Voluminous historical narratives were written afterwards and copied by hand. It was felt important that the nation’s great trauma should be understood and never forgotten.

I came upon The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson in the English translation by Karl Smári Hreinsson and Adam Nichols some years ago. The original manuscript is lost, but nearly forty somewhat differentiated copies survive. Confusingly narrated in places and packed with biblical references, it describes the raid on the Westman Islands, the four weeks the author spent captive in Algiers and his journey to Denmark in pursuit of a ransom from the king. Under the dense religious language (wholly of its time but laborious for a modern reader) can be glimpsed a man who loved his family and was distressed at losing them, a scrupulous reporter, a clergyman who found his own sorrows near intolerable and the effort to contextualise them within his faith agonising. He mentions an eleven-year-old son, a younger un-named child, and a boy born on the ship who was named after Ólafur’s murdered fellow priest. Other than Egill being the first choice of the pasha and perhaps subsequently going to Tunis, the children’s fates are not known. There was also a wife. ‘My dear wife,’ Ólafur calls her. She occasionally floats into focus in his account and that of others – a detail here, a line there – and then away again.

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.

There is nothing to be said for giving birth in the bowels of a sailing ship with your stomach heaving and hundreds of people listening. Really there is not, no matter how many blessings Ólafur insists on counting. In fact, Ásta is some way from persuaded that he is entitled to a view at all. During her last confinement he was so long at the harbour bidding the Danish governor skál over a brandy consignment from Copenhagen that there was no one to fetch the midwife.

Ólafur says she should be grateful for the tent. Tent? It’s a couple of lengths of damp sail hung from a beam, which arrived with the compliments of the big pirate captain with the pink face and blond eyelashes with whom her husband has struck up an inexplicable camaraderie. Ólafur has a knack for friendship: he will swallow the most flagrant offence to see what he might learn from another mind. Well, much pleasure may he take from that man’s mind. Today Ólafur is pleased to report that the length of cloth required to construct a Turkish turban is three yards and the sash around the long jackets they wear over those ridiculous trousers is even longer: ‘More than seven yards, my dear. Can you believe it?’

It is bad enough to be penned inside the hold of a galleon on the high seas, the first twinges of labour upon you and the panic growing, without being exhorted to be grateful for a sail and excited about the length of a silken sash.

He is probably trying to help.

Ásta heaves her belly to the right and stretches the cramp out of her left leg, trying not to prod old Oddrún Pálsdóttir, whose curled back is pressed against the other side of the sail. More neighbours, dozen upon dozen of them, are sprawled to the gunwales beyond the old woman, trying to sleep. Ásta can hear her fellow prisoners, and smell them. She can feel the weight of their torpid misery pressing in on her. Stockfish tossed together end to end and skin to skin for selling is hardly packed more tight than this wretched human cargo. But at least she and her family are largely out of sight. To that extent the sail does afford a modicum of privacy, which in fairness (mark this concession in your sleep, Ólafur) she should probably be gracious enough to admit.

Ólafur is forever urging her to be fair: ‘Pray consider rising less quickly to the boil, Ásta mín, and judge more calmly.’ He would do well to remember that fairness and coolness are just as quick to desert him when he mounts the pulpit. His zest for admonishing the congregation is by common consent a model of intemperance. It is true, all the same, that when everyone else inclines to hysteria Ólafur will reliably be at his most reasonable. This she must also acknowledge. Being fair.

‘Don’t be afraid to look in their eyes,’ he said that first day, as she lumbered over the side of the ship and turned to look back at the fire leaping through the wooden church of Landakirkja. ‘You will see they are men like any other.’

He took her arm then, trying to nudge her from the sight of the flames. ‘See, my love, no tails. No knives growing out of their elbows, no sulphur pouring from their mouths. So much for the rumours. Some of them don’t even look particularly wicked up close, do they?’

She felt the tremble of his hand, though. His voice was brittle, the way it goes when he is hurt and trying not to show it. His face, always thin, was taut with the emotion he was holding in. Even the English had not gone so far as to raze God’s house to ashes.

The dark young corsair who came to attach the sail did not look much like a devil either, for all that his eyes were black. As he hoisted it over a joist, the sleeves of his tunic fell back and Ásta was disconcerted to find herself admiring the cormorant sheen of his arms. When he caught her glance and saw how close she was to her time, he smiled down at her. That was too much. Ólafur said later he thought it was a kind smile, kind enough at least, but she was seized only by the most ferocious desire to strike the man on his cheerful mouth.

How pleasantly did they smile, this handsome corsair and his fellows, when they murdered her uncle Jón in a cave by the sea? Or chased Kristín, merriest of neighbours, until she could run no more and bled to death on the hill, her skirts about her waist and the dead baby hanging from its cord? Or drove young Erlendur Runólfsson to the edge of a cliff, stripped him to the waist and fired their muskets until he toppled backwards into the waves?

How can Ólafur talk to these people? How can someone who spends his days down here consoling the frightened and the heartbroken take even a moment to weigh the kindly intent behind a pirate’s smile? Ásta seethes every time she thinks of it.

Ólafur is doing his best to stay reasonable and raise spirits. She cannot deny it, although in her present state of weepy exhaustion even his consolations are obscurely annoying. Day after day he squeezes around the hold, trying to avoid stepping on his flock as he reminds them they are only being tested, that suffering is what all people must endure in this world and they should look to the life beyond and not be discouraged.

‘Ólafur,’ she is fit to erupt, ‘may God above forgive me, but we are completely and utterly discouraged. How could it not be so?’



If Ásta were dwelling on her discomforts (which she is trying so hard not to that she is dwelling on nothing else), she might enumerate surging nausea, tightening belly, cramping leg, fisting baby and the mounting urge to pee when there is no pail to hand and no prospect of one for hours, if then. To say nothing of the grind of bare wood on her spine, the tickle of coiled rope at her neck or the fleabite on her left ankle that is impossible to reach without disturbing at least four people. Unless she can find something else to think about, that itch is going to be what shakes the ship with her roaring before the labour ever does.

But what is there else to think about that will not tear her with grief?

The smell? The dark, unspeakable stench of human beings oozing distress? Worse. She must not on any account think about the smell. (But still – might it actually be possible to die of a smell? How long would it take?) No, try concentrating on the night noises. Not the slow creak of the timbers and the sea slap – not those noises – but the sounds of the people: the lone sob, trembling away to nothing; the snores (no mistaking Oddrún’s high-pitched whistle, and that can only be Einar Loftsson’s volcanic rumble dominating many lesser efforts); somewhere nearby a grunt of furtive pleasure; further away a fart so stirring (as Ásta reflects, blinking) that it would have proved its mettle in the Battle of Jericho. The sigh of murmuring voices rises and falls. A woman is retching. A child won’t stop moaning. A man, perhaps in sleep, lets out a cry of naked sorrow. These sudden cries are the worst. All the weeping down here Ásta can tolerate: hear enough of it, do enough yourself, and you hardly notice after a while. But the howls of anguish in the night still make her heart pound with terror.

Here comes another of the tightenings, harder and harder until her belly feels like a stone you could beat and flake a dried cod on, then relaxing. They don’t hurt much yet, but nor do they make sleeping any easier. The floor undulates beneath her, making her stomach lurch and bringing bile again and again to her throat. She has never been a good sailor: even being rowed out to the Westman Islands as a girl had her hanging over the side, to the amusement of the fishermen at the oars.

It is becoming difficult to judge how many days they have been at sea. Ólafur says nine. But when the only light is from lamps swinging and clattering in the swell, it can be a struggle to tell day and night apart. Some communal instinct below has established a night-time, but it is one that Ásta’s body remains reluctant to observe.

Tentatively she stretches another leg, this time provoking a muffled yelp from the other side of the sail. Poor Oddrún. She hardly deserves to have her miseries compounded by the restless foot of a woman whose baby is past its time. The island’s greatest talker has hardly said a word since the voyage began. Day and night she lies still and forlorn, with her face turned away and her cap holding on by a thread, paying no heed to the mockers who torment her still. ‘Oddrún will be all right, seeing she’s a seal,’ they taunt, too loud, too close. ‘Lend us a flipper, Oddrún, will you, if we go down.’ But the old woman has only sunk further into herself and kept her eyes closed.

Ásta shifts again, disturbing a rat. It streaks across her fanned hair and back into the darkness beyond the lamplight. Shadows leap across the sail as the vessel dips and climbs. Ólafur’s face is buried in her back. Egill lies with his head next to hers, one arm reaching across little Marta to touch his mother’s hand. She wishes the boy would weep. When the pirates put Ofanleiti to the flame, he saw sights that no child should. He is also tormented by the thought that he was not as brave as his best friend. ‘After we were captured, Magnús managed to creep away,’ he has told her, looking at his hands and refusing to meet her gaze. ‘He asked me to come and hide on our secret gannet ledge, but I didn’t dare.’

And what can a mother say? That a part of her is glad he was not brave the way Magnús was, because otherwise she would not have him here at her side, her firstborn son, the pool from which her heart drinks? At eleven Egill is too nearly a man to want to hear this. He has never been one to speak his own heart aloud; but in the night, when no one is looking, he slips his hand in hers.

Marta is curled, neat as a mouse, in the space between Ásta’s chin and her protruding belly. By day she sits more or less calmly by her mother’s side, as if sensing there is no point in making a fuss. Ásta used to find her composure at not yet three years unsettling, especially after the bawling tantrums from Helga at the same age, but in their present calamity her stillness is a comfort.

Helga is not here. She left for the mainland earlier this summer and is surely safe. The pirates raided parts of the coast, but Torfastadir is well inland. Has Helga heard yet that her family has been seized by Turkish corsairs and carried off in a ship with great white sails to a place beyond imagining? The news must have been carried across the water by now, although it will have taken time for the remaining islanders to work out who is taken, who escaped and whose bloated body might yet be discovered on some desolate strand. Is her eldest daughter at this moment crying herself to sleep in the priesthouse at Torfastadir, wondering what will become of her? Dear, fiery Helga, so eager to get away from an island where they talked of nothing – ‘nothing at all, Mamma’ – but fish, who begged to go and keep house for her stepsister because (may God forgive the child) nothing interesting ever happened at home. The conversation in the home of Thorgerdur and Gísli will not have proved for one minute more stimulating: Ólafur’s daughter by his first wife is exceedingly dull and her husband nearly always drunk. But when Ásta said as much, Helga tossed the auburn curls of which she has always been more proud than she should be and retorted huffily, ‘You came to the island when you were not much older than me, Mamma, and wasn’t it because you were just as glad to be offered something more? Isn’t that what you told us?’

Something more. The ship rolls and bucks and Ásta fights down another wave of nausea. One child she may never see again; two with a future she dare not contemplate; another agitating to be born in a reeking prison-ship on a voyage into slavery. Dear God, how did it come to this?

It was a fine morning. That she will always remember – how lovely dawned the seventeenth day of July in the year 1627, the day the pirates came. It was one of those mornings when the wind breathes the scent of cut grass and the sea wrinkles like an old man’s hand. When you can see nearly all the islands dozing for miles around in the clear light. When your fingers fly so lightly to the plucking that you forget the pile still waiting. When you raise your face to the sun and it warms you and you realise – so Ásta did, tossing a feather in the air for Marta to catch – that the dread hanging over the island for weeks has gone and you are happy.

The panic the previous day when three ships were spotted off the mainland, tacking back and forth in the lee of the Eyjafjalla glacier, was over. When it drew nearer, the lead galleon had turned out to be flying a Danish flag, bringing not terror but protection at last. The pirates who had ravaged parts of the mainland and shocked the whole of Iceland to the core were gone. The Westman Islands could breathe again.

Lined up before Ásta were her beloved Small Isles. There stood neat, round Haena, jagged Hrauney and Hani, with that look of a seal in a cap that always reminded her so delightfully of someone she knew. ‘Hello, Oddrún,’ she would nod to the bulky isle of a morning. ‘What story have you for me today?’

Ásta has never told Oddrún about her nickname for the island: the old woman has strong feelings about being a seal and tires of jests. Long ago her sealskin was lost under the midnight sun. She is emphatic about this, her oyster eyes liquid with sincerity. She and the other sealfolk swam ashore to dance on Heimaey’s black summer sands, and there they took their skins off and laid them on the warm rocks to dry. All night long they span and they sang, their bodies lithe and golden under the unsleeping sun, until it was time to slip back into their skins and return to the sea. Oddrún made to go with them, but when she looked for hers it was gone. Stolen, she is sure. ‘Come back, come back, don’t leave me here,’ she called to the retreating sealfolk as they plunged into the waves’ bosomy embrace. But one by one they disappeared, and Oddrún was left without her skin to make a life on Heimaey, never feeling quite herself. She was young then, she insists, and her body firm and slender; but if the thief were to return the pelt now, it would no longer fit a waddling old woman. This is her particular grief. This is the point in the story when she always starts to weep fat, despairing tears.

Ásta’s sharp-tongued aunt Margrét used to explode with exasperation. ‘Oddrún,’ she cried once, ‘half the folk on this island knew your father.’

But Margrét (may God protect her wherever she is now) has never been one to look much further than her own pointed nose. She would be the last person to wonder whether Oddrún Pálsdóttir has been weeping all her life for something else.



It was not long before Oddrún arrived in person that sparkling morning, labouring up the Ofanleiti slope with her broad face pouring. . .