Heimilisfang
Velja afhendingarmáta

In the summer of 1627, Barbary corsairs from North Africa raided Iceland. They killed dozens of people and captured over four hundred, transporting them to Salé and Algiers to sell into slavery. Among the captives taken to Algiers were Reverend Ólafur Egilsson, a Lutheran minister in his sixties, and his young family. Reverend Ólafur wrote a chronicle of his experiences both as a captive and a traveller, for he journeyed alone from Algiers to Denmark in an attempt to raise funds to ransom his family and the other Icelandic captives. As well as Reverend Ólafur’s narrative, this book contains a detailed report on the Algerian corsair raid, based on harrowing eye-witness accounts, plus a collection of letters written by enslaved Icelanders in Algiers describing the dire conditions under which they lived. The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson (known in Icelandic as Reisubók séra Ólafs Egilssonar) is a well known classic of Icelandic literature, but it has never before been translated into English.