NEW BOOK ANNOUNCEMENTS
In the summer of 1627, two groups of Barbary corsairs raided Iceland. My Icelandic colleague, Karl Smári Hreinsson, and I have published five books on these raids—known in Iceland as the Tyrkjáranið (the “Turkish raid”).
The first of these books was The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson: The Story of the Barbary Corsair Raid on Iceland in 1627, published by the Catholic University of America Press in 2016. This book contains English translations of a number of seventeenth century Icelandic documents dealing with the events of the Tyrkjáranið, the longest and most compete of which is a narrative penned by Reverend Ólafur Egilsson. There are links to the Amazon listing for that book here in this blog (at the bottom of every post).
After The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson, Karl and I wrote four more books on the Tyrkjáranið. These were narrative histories. That is, they describe the raids and their aftermath—in Iceland and North Africa—in novelistic fashion, focusing on the characters involved as much as possible.
Until recently, these four narrative histories were only available in Iceland.
Now they are available on Amazon.
These four books are listed below—with their covers and Amazon links.
Northern Captives: The Story of the Barbary Corsair Raid on Grindavík in 1627, tells the story of the raid by corsairs from Salé on southwest Iceland. It details the events of the attack itself and then follows the Icelandic captives to Salé, where they were sold into slavery.
Stolen Lives: The Story of the Barbary Corsair Raid on Heimaey in 1627, tells the story of the raid by corsairs from Algiers on Heimaey, one of the Westman Islands, located off Iceland’s south coast. It details the events of the attack on Heimaey and then follows the Icelandic captives to Algiers, where they too were sold into slavery.
Enslaved: The Story of the Barbary Corsair Raid on East Iceland in 1627, tells the story of the raid by the same corsairs from Algiers on the East Fjords, in southeast Iceland. It details the events of the attack on the East Fjords and then follows the Icelandic captives to Algiers, where they were sold into slavery along with the Heimaey islanders.
Turbulent Times: Skálholt and the Barbary Corsair Raids on Iceland in 1627, explores for the first time the role played by Skálholt, the seat of the Bishops of South Iceland, and Skálholtsskóli (Skálholt’s school) in the creation of the Icelandic accounts of the corsair raids of 1627. It presents a description of Skálholt and the times in which it existed as well as the accounts themselves, translated from the original seventeenth century Icelandic.
The most recent book published by my Icelandic colleague, Karl Smári Hreinsson, and I is a French translation that I did (with the assistance of Jade Carameaux-Jurewicz).
The book is titled La razzia septentrionale: L’histoire des raids corsaires barbaresques de Salé et d’Algiers sur l’Islande en 1627 (The Northern Raid: The Story of the Raids on Iceland in 1627 by Barbary corsairs from Salé and Algiers).
La razzia septentrionale is a big book—over 420 pages. It contains translations of all the major Icelandic texts on the corsair raids on Iceland in the summer of 1627, the most comprehensive collection of these texts every translated and published outside Iceland. It also contains non-Icelandic texts from the seventeenth century as well as chapters on Iceland in the seventeenth century and on the process of ransoming captives/slaves.
In late 2024, I published Corsairs & Captives: Narratives from the Age of the Barbary Pirates.
This book is available on Amazon in the US, the UK, and Canada, as well as all the other Amazon locations.
As readers of this blog know, Barbary corsairs swarmed the Mediterranean and the Atlantic for the better part of three hundred years (from the mid sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries), seizing enormous amounts of booty and tens of thousands of captives and hauling them back to North African slave markets and auctioning them off to the highest bidder.
The conflict between these Barbary corsairs and Europe was military, but not just that; religious, but not just that; social and economic, but not just that either. Above all, it was a human conflict, with all the confusion, blurred lines, and inherent messiness of such things, and the narratives it generated were more complicated than simple swashbuckling pirate tales.
Corsairs & Captives presents a collection of these narratives, all based directly on primary-source documents, several of which are translated into English for the first time. They include biographies of four renegade corsair captains (Europeans who converted to Islam and became corsairs), descriptions of sea battles by those who were there, accounts of ransomed captives, the report of a French Trinitarian friar who led a ransoming expedition to Algiers, even the transcript of a trial held by the Canary Islands chapter of the (in)famous Spanish Inquisition.
These narratives bring to life a world much rougher than our own but no less complicated, in which people with the ordinary human fears and aspirations we are familiar with today struggled to endure. It is not the world most people expect when they think of Barbary corsairs. It is more interesting than that.
There are links to the Amazon listing for this book here in this blog (at the bottom of every post).
The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson: The Story of the Barbary Corsair Raid on Iceland in 1627 was published in 2016. This book contains English translations of a number of seventeenth century Icelandic documents dealing with the events of the Tyrkjáranið, the longest and most compete of which is a narrative penned by Reverend Ólafur Egilsson.
There are links to the Amazon listing for this book here in this blog (at the bottom of every post).
The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson is also available as an audio book from Amazon:
The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson – Audio Book
Karl and I have also had a number of our books translated.
The first was in Greek:
Τα ταξίδια του αιδεσιμότατου Όλαφουρ Έγκιλσον (The Travels of Ólafur Egilsson), translated by Thalnis N. Karagiannopoulos, published in 2023 by Lavyrinthos Books, Athens, Greece. This book is a translation of the revised edition of The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson and contains all the Icelandic texts of that edition.
Τα ταξίδια του αιδεσιμότατου Όλαφουρ Έγκιλσον
The second was in Italian:
Schiavi dal Nord: L’incursione dei pirati barbareschi in terra d’Islanda – Grindavík 1627 (Slaves of the North: The Barbary Corsair Raid on Iceland – Grindavík 1627), translated by Attilio Sodi Russotto, published in 2023 by Passaggio al Bosco Edizioni, Florence, Italy. This book is a translation of the complete text of Northern Captives: The Story of the Barbary Corsair Raid on Grindavík in 1627.
The third was also in Italian:
Vite Rubate L’incursione dei pirati barbareschi in terra d’Islanda – Heimaey, 1627 (Stolen Lives: The Barbary Corsair Raid on Iceland – Heimaey, 1627), translated by Attilio Sodi Russotto, published in 2025 by Passaggio al Bosco Edizioni, Florence, Italy. This book is a translation of the complete text of Stolen Lives: The Story of the Barbary Corsair Raid on Heimaey in 1627.
There is also a Dutch translation from some years ago:
De reizen van Ólafur Egilsson: een 17e-eeuwse Ijslander ontvoerd door moslimpiraten (The Travels of Ólafur Egilsson: a 17th-century Icelander Captured by Muslim Pirates), translated by Joris van Os, published in 2019 by Uitgeverij de Brouwerij / Brainbooks, Maassluis, Netherlands. This book is a translation of the Revised Edition of The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson, containing all the Icelandic texts of that edition.
