In the summer of 1627, an unimaginable and at the same time atrocious event was recorded in the annals of modern European history. Barbary pirates from North Africa raided Iceland, killed dozens of people, and captured more than four hundred, whom they transported to Salé and Algiers to sell as slaves. Among the captives taken to Algiers were the Reverend Ólafur Egilsson, a Lutheran priest about sixty years old, his young wife, and their two children, a toddler and a minor.

The Reverend Ólafur wrote a chronicle of his experiences, both as a captive and as a traveler, as he traveled alone from Algiers to Denmark in an attempt to collect money to ransom his family, as well as the other Icelandic captives. In addition to Reverend Ólafur's narrative, this book includes detailed accounts of the Barbary pirates' raid, based on painful testimonies from eyewitnesses, as well as a collection of letters written by Icelandic captives in Algiers.

The travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson is a classic work of Icelandic literature, which until recently had not been translated into other languages and is a valuable source for the desperate and inhumane conditions that prevailed in the Ottoman slave markets during those years.