Literary Redemption: Burial Rites by Hannah Kent

by Isabella Ingram

The story of Iceland’s last execution in 1830 – in which a man and a woman were beheaded for the murders of two men on a farm in Illugastaðir, northern Iceland - has been mythologised in the country today. In the 200 years following its occurrence, the stories surrounding the double murders have inspired ten novels, a feature film and a pop song – whilst both the farm in which the murders took place, as well as the site of the execution, have become tourist attractions on Iceland’s “Illugastaðir ghost trail”.

For a story that has inspired so many other stories, there are remarkably few known facts about the Illugastaðir murders. It was reported that, on the 14th March 1828, a woman burst in on the residents of Iceland’s remote farm of Stapakot, with the news that the neighbouring farm at Illugastaðir was on fire, and that two men were trapped inside. When the fire was extinguished, however, it was found that the two men had not died from the flames, but had instead been stabbed twelve times and clubbed with a hammer. The woman had been one of the three murderers, and the farm had been set alight with shark oil.

It is perhaps not the details of the crime itself, however, but the gloomy, haunting landscape of Illugastaðir – with its sea-fogs and grey skies – that has captured the imaginations of so many. One such person is Australian author Hannah Kent, whose novel, Burial Rites, tells the story of Agnes Magnúsdóttir, one of the three murderers, in the days leading up to her execution, during which she was held in the home of a farming family from the village of Kornsá, due to the absence of prisons in Iceland in the early nineteenth century. Burial Rites was published after Kent won the inaugural Writing Australia Unpublished Manuscript Award in 2011, and has since become a global success.

Whilst Kent’s novel is one of many fictionalisations of the Illugastaðir murders, its portrayal of Agnes distinguishes it from many of the other publications on the subject. Burial Rites presents Agnes as the manipulated and abused servant of Natan Ketilsson, who was one of the two victims. The murders, furthermore, are instigated not by Agnes but by Friðrik Sigurðsson – who, motivated by jealousy, had brutally injured Natan, and was consequently executed alongside Agnes. Agnes herself, meanwhile, stumbles into the scene, and – upon finding Natan wounded and dying - is forced to finish the kill out of mercy: ‘“Do it!” I said. “Will you leave him slowly to die?”’. After this, she is quickly convicted and imprisoned, and the novel becomes a critique of the patriarchal nature of the contemporary justice system, which was compelled to condemn Agnes not for her crime but for the woman that she was, whilst the “young and sweet” Sigríður Guðmundsdóttir – or “Sigga”, who was also involved in the crime - had her sentence reduced from capital punishment to life imprisonment, because her nature more closely conformed to society’s notions of ‘femininity’.

In an interview, Kent described how – like so many before her – the story of the Illugastaðir murders and Agnes’ execution had “immediately intrigued” her: “a compulsion to tell the story of the execution, or more specifically Agnes’ story, continued to grow. Surely there was more to her character than the stereotypical ‘monster’ spoken of in the records of the murder?” Burial Rites, Kent explains, was “written to supply a more ambiguous portrayal of this woman”, and the story she sets is so compelling that it has even encouraged the staging of a retrial by a mock court, that will once again consider the evidence to assess both Agnes’ guilt and the fairness of the original proceeding. It will be conducted under modern Icelandic law, and will focus upon the possible motivation for the murders – a factor which, astonishingly, was not considered during the original trial – and whether Agnes Magnúsdóttir and Sigríður Guðmundsdóttir had been abused by the man that they came to kill. Whatever the result, the staging of the mock retrial demonstrates the potential fiction has to alter perception and encourage the reassessment of seemingly entrenched belief.