Tools of National Memory: The Turkish Raid in the Textbooks

• Main Author: Helgason, Þorsteinn
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: Icelandic
• Published: Menntavísindasvið Háskóla Íslands 2015
• Subjects: The Turkish Raid 1627; corsairs; piracy; textbooks; educational materials; textual analysis; collective memory; Tyrkjaránið 1627; korsarar; sjórán; kennslubækur; námsgögn; textagreining; sameiginleg minning; Iceland
• Online Access: https://ojs.hi.is/index.php/netla/article/view/1951

Textbooks are the educational tools of teachers and students alike and have been so for centuries. They also bear testimony to the mentality of their time as a result of their status as transmitters of recognized knowledge and accepted values, not least the textbooks used in history and the social sciences. Authors have some freedom within the limits set by what is perceived to be recognized knowledge and accepted values depending on the cultural and political milieu at any given time. Questions relating to nationalistic values as they appeared in textbooks have been studied intensively, whereas the object of the present study, a chosen event in national history, is rare. The event in question occurred in 1627 when corsairs (“pirates with a license”) raided the coastal regions of Iceland, capturing some 400 people and killing about 40, mostly Icelanders but also some Danes. The captives were sold in the slave market in the cities of Algiers and Sallee, Morocco, and around ten per cent of them were ransomed. From a macro perspective, this event represented a spill-over of the longstanding conflicts between Islam and Christianity in the Mediterranean. This was also an age of piracy and corsairing activities in Europe and elsewhere. From a micro perspective, the “Turkish Raid” is deeply rooted in Icelandic collective memory, narrated in written accounts and entangled in folktales and place names. To include the Turkish Raid in textbooks in (purely) Icelandic history is no easy task since it is an anomaly in the country’s history, not a milestone in a long line of events and developments. To omit it from history in a textbook aimed at children and adolescents is, nevertheless, hard to justify with reference to its firm rooting in national memory. Thus the author of the first history textbook for public schools, published in 1880, included a chapter about the Raid, connecting it chronologically with the death of a prominent bishop with which it had little or no connection, apart from its timing: “The same year as ...