Slavery

The year is 1627, Shakespeare is but a decade in his grave and Charles 1 in the second year of his reign. It was an annus horribilis for the people of Iceland, then a Danish protectorate. In two raids that summer, slave traders in their corsairs from Algiers, led by two renegade Dutchmen, brutally attacked settlements along Iceland's southern coast, in particular in the Westman Islands, killing dozens, burning villages and eventually carrying off 400 Icelanders to be sold into slavery in the markets of Algiers, an audacious round-trip journey of 5,400 miles under sail; 400 human souls represented 1% of Iceland's sparse population at the time, and even today its population is only 364,000

Sally Magnusson is the author a wonderful novel, which brings vividly to life the surroundings and experiences of those captive slaves. The Sealwoman's Gift is imaginatively conceived, beautifully written and carefully researched.  She marries the bares bones of the historical record to a fully realised and thoroughly believable 17th century world. Her story spans the impoverished wind-swept landscape of dour Lutheran Iceland and the luxuriant cosmopolitan Islamic diaspora of Moors and Arabs in North Africa, and the narrative is colourfully embellished with many stories and sagas from both those cultures. She writes simply but with poetic intensity and in a few sentences can transport you almost physically into the sights, smells and sounds of her scenes and into the very presence of the men and women she so finely and sensitively observes.

The dramatic events of those times are seen through the eyes, thoughts and lived experiences of Åsta, a remarkable Icelandic woman at the centre of the story and a talented story-teller herself. This slice of history is vividly depicted from a woman’s point of view, one which is so often neglected in the telling of our past. There are many engrossing themes, especially the importance of story-telling, the meaning of love: How do you measure it? and loss: What price must you pay for losing your children forever, even losing the prospect of meeting them in heaven?

Hung out to dry?

 This nice clue from Robert Price appeared in The Sunday Times:

Jeans and shirt put outside to air (8).

All you need to solve it is a brand name for jeans and a 3-letter word for a type of shirt.

The same either way

 A week or so ago, the date was palindromic, provided one subscribes to the format DD/MM/YYYY that is. There will be another palindromic date in February next year, but then a long wait until the earlier 2030s for more. Will they go on forever? If humanity is still around at the end of the 10th millennium and still keeping track of the days in a similar fashion, it will depend on the new format. If it's DD/MM/YYYYY, then yes, they will continue to the same old irregular way.

By coincidence  this morning, I clicked on that seemingly endless source of unpredictable entertainment and bizarre novelty, Greg Ross's  Futility Closet website, and discovered some verbal palindromes that were new to me. Mathematicians Peter Hilton and Henry Whitehead, who had been codebreaking colleagues at Bletchley Park during WW2, got into a palindrome exchange in 1947. Whitehead began with STEP ON NO PETS, to which Hilton retaliated with SEX AT NOON TAXES and after a sleepless but very creative night improved upon with DOC, NOTE, I DISSENT. A FAST NEVER PREVENTS A FATNESS. I DIET ON COD. Not surprisingly that 51-letter sequence brought the exchange to an abrupt end. It certainly trumps the old one about the Panama man with his canal.

I met Peter Hilton briefly when visiting  the University of Binghamton in the 1990s. He wrote a seminal book on Topology with Shaun Wylie, another Bletchley alumnus, whose inspiring Cambridge lectures on Real Analysis (rigorous Calculus) I was privileged to attend in 1957. While at Binghamton Hilton wrote a charming book with Jean Pedersen connecting algebra to special kinds of paper folding; the title is A Mathematical Tapestry (CUP, 2010,  ISBN 0-521-12821-8).