Why this book: I was planning to travel to Iceland for a hike and wanted to learn about the people and its history. This book was strongly  recommended by two women on the hike.

Summary in 4 Sentences:  The book is a biography of  Thurídur Einarsdóttir (1777-1863) who was born and lived in a remote rural fishing village on the southeast coast of Iceland.  She was intrepid and ambitious from a very young age, and wanted to join the boys and men in the fishing that was the lifeblood of her community, and so became a capable deckhand as a young teenager.  She evolved to become one of the most successful fishing captains in her region, but the book goes into her private life, how the men of power resented her and undermined her success.  The author takes us through her entire life until the end, and the reader is inspired by her resilience and character, and we learn not only about her life, but so much also about the culture of rural Iceland in the 18th and 19th centuries. 

My impressions:  This book was a very pleasant surprise – thoroughly enjoyed reading it and was fascinated by the world the author describes that provided the context for Thuridur’s life and successes. She was born in a remote fishing village in Iceland in  1777,  started going to sea with her father when she was 11 and was fully qualified to captain a fishing boat by the time she was 17. These fishing boats were open, powered by men pulling six, eight, or ten oars with no protection from rain or sea spray.  It was tough work.   She lived an amazing life, a successful fisherman for over 50 years, including in the winter, a career that was matched by few men and no women at that time. 

As a young girl, she recognized that fishing was the lifeblood of the small community where she lived and she wanted to be part of it – volunteering as a young teenage girl to work with her father on his fishing boat.   Clearly, she was a boldly independent woman from a young age – and chose against convention to wear trousers and men’s clothing, because it was more practical in the work she was doing.  As she grew older, her wearing of trousers indeed became a part of her identity and one of many things which set her apart.  But for her independence of spirit, she was not only admired, but also feared and resented by some men in her community, and she depended on a few powerful people to protect her from the wealthy community leaders who resented the respect and influence she had earned, and who deliberately sought to undermine her reputation and ability to work.

She was married three times but none of the marriages worked out.  Her husbands wanted  a more traditional subservient wife, a role that did not fit her character,  and because she refused to be the compliant, passive wife that her husbands demanded, her marriages did not last.   So for most of her life, she had to earn her own living.  She insisted on freedom and autonomy, and always defaulted to a path which, though not lucrative in financial or physical rewards, gave her the most freedom and the fewest restrictions.

 Though she had had great success as a fishing captain, she was never wealthy, and had to carefully manage her expenses, but spent much of what little she had taking care of others who had no guardian or sponsor – including her own mother when her married sister refused to take care of her, and her disabled niece when that same sister refused to take care of her own daughter.  There were many key inflection points in her life when she made decisions based on her compulsion to do right and protect the weak and vulnerable, even when it cost her.  Her independence, and refusal to be cowed into subservience annoyed the rich and powerful men in her community, and they succeeded in spreading rumors and lies about her that turned her community against her.  Eventually she chose to leave rather than live in that emotionally hostile environment.  

When she left her village of Stokkseyri, she was able to find work in Thorlakshofn a nearby town, and the only town on the south coast of Iceland with a natural harbor. Though a small town, it was (and is) much larger and more cosmopolitan than Stokkseyri.  There she fished and also worked for a young man she’d helped in Stokkseyrie many years before who’d moved to Thorlakshofn and managed a store.  She became well known and well respected in that town, and as she aged, though well into her 60s and beyond, she remained strong and fit, and earned extra money guiding visitors to into the back country or on overland routes to other towns along the coast. After several years living in Thorlakshofn,  she longed to return to the Stokkseyrie where the small-town controversies and envy that had forced her departure had subsided and many of her enemies had died or moved on.  When she returned to Stokkseyrie in her later years, she was welcomed and recognized as a significant figure in their community. 

By this time she had given up fishing and spent the last years of her life mentoring other independent young people, including those who marched to their own drummers, as she had. One such young man who she mentored was  outside the Stokkseyrie mainstream, who was what we today might consider a book geek, not a macho fisherman.   Thuridur took a liking to him and the feeling was mutual.  The young man spent much time with her and wrote down the stories she told him, which many years later he published as a book which contributed significantly to this book.  Eventually in her old age, she lived with relatives in Eyrarbakki, the next town over from Stokkseyrie, where she died at the age of 86 – a very ripe old age for that time and for having lived in those very tough conditions.

On my trip to Iceland I with several friends was able to visit Stokkseyrie, which it is an exaggeration to call a village – just a few homes, a convenience store and a community center.  Several decades ago, the community built a replica of the fishing huts that fishermen including Thuridur, lived in during the winter season, and they built it in triubute to Thuridor, on the site where she had her own hut toward the end of her life.  Below are pictures we took of that hut.

I loved learning about Thuridur, her life, and about the challenges and idiosyncrasies of life in a rural fishing village in the Iceland of two plus centuries ago.  I and my friends who read the book greatly admired her strength of character, her resourcefulness and resilience in the face of adversity.  Her self confidence, integrity and Stoic strength of character allowed her to survive and thrive under very challenging conditions.  She is the embodiment of the Icelandic term I learned (which they consider a national motto) “Petta Reddast” which means:   It will work out, things will be Ok. 

Also I was amazed at the detail that the author was able to find and share with us. How did she get so much detail?  Here’s a piece of an interview with the author that I found on line: 

…what we found— that just farmers wrote about their neighbors. When I first started doing this research, there was one book written by— started by a 16 year old boy who had no education, who started interviewing Þuríður when she was older—phenomenal! And he spent 50 years putting this together, and he did a series of newspaper articles in the late 1800s, which were put together in an edited book in 1945, about Þuríður, actually. It’s amazing. And I thought that’s all there was practically. Not so. Because she was such an amazing person, everybody wrote about her. There’s just tons, both in the archives as we going through these archives, page by page, we come across more and more and more and more about her, and in books in the library, old books, where people— they have these books like Saga of Stokkseyri or some town, that people talk about their own towns and record what people say or these occurrences. And so people recorded, they remembered and wrote down verbatim conversations. And they wrote about adulterous affairs. They wrote about children who were born that weren’t really supposed to be born to that person. They wrote about fights. They wrote about betrayals. They wrote about love. It’s phenomenal the detail with which they wrote. So you know, we were lucky.*

*https://scandinavian.washington.edu/crossing-north-23-woman-captain-rebel