The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson (Reisubók Séra Ólafs Egilssonar)

In the summer of 1627, Barbary corsairs raided Iceland, killing dozens of people and abducting close to four hundred to sell into slavery in North Africa. Among those taken were the Lutheran minister Reverend Ólafur Egilsson. Reverend Ólafur wrote The Travels to chronicle his experiences both as a captive in Algiers and as a traveller across Europe.

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In the summer of 1627, Barbary corsairs raided Iceland, killing dozens of people and abducting close to four hundred to sell into slavery in North Africa. Among those taken were the Lutheran minister Reverend Ólafur Egilsson.

Reverend Ólafur (born in the same year as William Shakespeare and Galileo Galilei) wrote The Travels to chronicle his experiences both as a captive in Algiers and as a traveler across Europe (he journeyed alone from Algiers to Copenhagen in an attempt to raise funds to ransom the captives that remained in the Barbary States). He was a keen observer, and the narrative is filled with a wealth of detail—social, political, economic, religious—about both the Maghreb and Europe. It is also a moving story on the human level: we witness a man enduring great personal tragedy and struggling to reconcile such calamity with his understandingof God.

The Travels is the first-ever English translation of the Icelandic texts. Until now, the corsair raid on Iceland has remained largely unknown in the English speaking world.

To give a clearer sense of the extraordinary events connected with that raid, this edition of The Travels includes not only Reverend Ólafur’s first-person narrative but also a wealth of contemporary letters describing both the events of the raid itself and the conditions in North Africa under which the enslaved Icelanders lived. The book has Appendices containing background information on the cities of Algiers and Salé in the seventeenth century, on Iceland in the seventeenth century, on the manuscripts accessed for the translation, and on the book’s early modern European context.

The combination of Reverend Ólafur’s narrative, the letters, and thematerial in the Appendices provides a first-hand, in-depth view of early seventeenth-century Europe and the Maghreb equaled by few otherworks dealing with the period. We are pleased to offer it to the wider audience that an English edition allows.