TURBULENT TIMES – SKÁLHOLTSSKÓLI

This week we’ll look at another excerpt from Turbulent Times, the new book about the Barbary corsair raids on Iceland in 1627 that my Icelandic college, Karl Smári Hreinsson, and I published this past summer.

I have slightly abridge the original material from the book to make it fit more easily into this post.

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In the summer of 1627, two separate groups of Barbary corsairs appeared without warning in Icelandic waters. One group, from Salé, on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, arrived towards the end of June and pillaged southwest Iceland. A second, larger group, from Algiers, arrived in early July and plundered southeast Iceland, and the Westman Islands, off the south coast. The Salé corsairs were gone before June ended. The Algiers corsairs left by the middle of July.

Though they did not stay long, these two groups together killed as many as forty or more people and abducted close to five hundred—men, women, and children—whom they hauled away to Salé and Algiers to be sold into slavery.

Such devastating coastal raids by Barbary corsairs were not uncommon events during this time. The Mediterranean shorelines of large parts of Italy, France, and Spain had been virtually depopulated by decades of such attacks. The distance the corsairs had travelled in order to reach Iceland was unprecedented, but the raids on Iceland—referred to by Icelanders as the Tyrkjaránið (the Turkish raid)—were not, in themselves, unique.

There is, however, one aspect of the raids that makes them stand out: no other Barbary corsair land raids of the time have been documented so well. One Icelandic scholar has observed that “hardly had the pennants of the corsair ships disappeared below the horizon before people started writing about the attacks.”

Multiple accounts of the Tyrkjaránið exist in the form of official reports, letters, and detailed narratives. These various writings not only describe in detail the events of the raids themselves but also tell what happened afterwards, in Salé and Algiers. Nowhere else is there such a wealth of information about a corsair raid.

This singular aspect of the Tyrkjaránið tends to get overlooked. What was it about Icelanders of the time that made them record events in such detail and then preserve those accounts over the centuries? This is an especially intriguing question when you consider that people in Italy, Sardinia, France, the Balearic Islands, the Canary Islands, Spain, Portugal, and even England all suffered multiple land raids by Barbary corsairs, and yet not a single one of those many raids is documented in the same sort of detail as the Tyrkjaránið is.

The answer to this question turns out to be a combination of historical context and of sheer chance.

Iceland might have been isolated geographically—a rural island stuck way out in the middle of the North Atlantic—but it was not isolated culturally. When the Lutheran revolution swept through northern Europe, it also swept through Iceland.

This had a variety of consequences. The one that matters for us here has to do with education:

Lutheranism emphasized literacy. There had been two cathedral schools in Iceland since the early Middle Ages: Hólaskóli (Hólar’s school) in the north, and Skálholtskoli (Skálholt’s school) in the southwest. Under the new Lutheran Bishops, these schools became far more serious institutions of learning. They provided the equivalent of today’s K-12 education, but with a decided religious (Lutheran) bent and a focus on mastering Latin, which in those days was a fundamental prerequisite for being educated.

Both schools were small, with student populations of only about twenty-five to thirty, but they kept producing graduates year after year, and those graduates—the ones who only graduated from the school itself as well as those who went abroad to continue their studies at the University of Copenhagen and then returned—went on to fill important positions in Icelandic society.

Most became pastors. Others filled administrative posts in the church or the government or served as representatives in the local þings (parliamentary gatherings) or in the national Alþingi. Some became prosperous famers and landowners, or took over the running of such farms.

By the time of the Tyrkjaránið, Hólaskóli and Skálholtsskóli had sent out three generations of graduates—over seventy years’ worth. They were everywhere.

This is the historical context of the Tyrkjaránið.

The sheer chance aspect is simpler: among the nearly five hundred people captured in the corsair raids there happened to be some Skálholtsskóli graduates. Thanks to the education they had received there, these men could write clearly and movingly about their experiences, recording not only the brutal events of the raids themselves but also the conditions of the enslaved Icelanders in North Africa.

The men who wrote the reports about the raids, dutifully chronicling the violent details, were also Skálholtsskóli graduates.

So all the authors of who wrote about the Tyrkjaránið—those who penned letters from North Africa while still slaves, those who managed one way or another to return to Iceland and create narratives, and those who wrote reports about the raids—had one thing in common: they had all attended Skálholtsskóli.

So what was Skálholtsskóli like?

It was part of Skálholt, the seat of the Bishop of South Iceland (the image at the top of this post is of Skálholt). The cathedral there was a tall, imposing wooden building. The other buildings were all turf houses, half sunk into the ground for insulation, with walls of stacked turf anything up to three feet (one meter) thick.

Skálholtskoli was a boarding school. The boys who attended it—Skálholtskoli, like Hólaskóli, only educated boys—lived there from September through May (they did not go home during the winter break).

Skálholtsskóli was a Latin school, and the curriculum was focused on teaching the boys to read and write Latin. By the time they had graduated, students there had been exposed to a wide variety of Latin writers, both Christian and pagan, and, if they had studied diligently enough, would have emerged as fluent Latin speakers. They also learned German (likely Middle Low German) and perfected their writing skills in Icelandic as well as Danish.

From the Icelandic sources, it is possible to recreate what daily life at Skálholtskoli was like.

The day began at 6:00 AM, with the upper-level students attending early church services and the lower-level students reviewing their lessons. The morning meal, taken at the refectory (i.e., the dining hall, think Harry Potter but on a much more modest scale), typically consisted of a slab of stockfish (air-dried fish) slathered with butter—rather like a piece of cold buttered toast—accompanied by milk or skyr (a kind of yogurt).

After that, the day’s studying commenced. This consisted of both reviewing previous days’ lessons and beginning new lessons and/or texts. At the end of the day, around 6:00 PM, the second meal was served (again at the refectory): another slab of stockfish with butter and more milk or skyr. After this came more review of the day’s lessons, evening prayer, and bed.

It should be remembered here that this was Iceland, located near the Arctic Circle, and in the short days of winter, there was only about four hours of sunlight—twilight, really. So a lot of the students’ time was spent in darkness and sub-Arctic cold.

It definitely seems a Spartan existence by modern standards, but by the values of the time, such a life was not so bad. Stockfish and butter remained the daily staple, but students (and everybody else) also ate beans, mutton, and sausages when available, sometimes accompanied by bread or hardtack biscuits. School was not held on Saturdays and Sundays, and students had the possibility of time off when they might need it. Those who got sick were sent to an infirmary where they received especially nourishing food.

The physical conditions might indeed have been Spartan, but under the Lutheran administration, the school provided students with a solid education. Think of it this way: the place had small classroom sizes, low student-to-teacher ratios, individual supervision, a curriculum that introduced students to a wide variety of writers and ideas, and exacting standards—all the elements we look for today in a successful school.

The proof of just how successful the school was lies in the multiple works written about the Tyrkjaránið, both moving individual accounts and detailed reports—all penned by Skálholtskoli graduates.

Without Skálholtskoli—and without the chance capture of a number of its graduates—we would know no more about the Barbary corsair raids on Iceland in 1627 than we do about the myriad unchronicled corsair raids that occurred all along the Atlantic shores of Europe at this time.