Burial Rites - Facts

 This novel is set in Iceland. Iceland is a Nordic island country between the North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans, on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge between North America and Europe.

The novel is based on true events. It is about the last woman to be executed in Iceland. She was involved in the Illugastadir murders. In 1828 a quack named Natan Ketilsson lived at the farm Illugastaðir with three other people.  Pétur Jónsson, a convict, a fifteen year old female named Sigríður Guðmundsdóttir who allegedly was the housekeeper and Agnes Magnúsdóttir who was a maid and worked for Natan at the farm.  

Agnes was attracted to Natan and had dreams of becoming his wife and the mistress at the farm.  As her dreams transformed into hatred, she teamed up with a young man from a nearby farm who had a crush on Sigríður, the very young housekeeper. His name was Friðrik Sigurðsson, and he also wanted to get his hands on possessions and wealth that he believed belonged to Natan. The hatred escalated to a point where they decided to murder Natan and also Petur, the convict.  One dark winter night in March of 1828 Friðirk came to the farm and hid with the help of Agnes and Sigríður until both men had gone to bed.  At that point, Friðrik took a hammer, walked to Natan's bed and smashed it into his head and repeated the heinous act at Peters bed, stabbed them both multiple times, and with help from Agnes and Sigríður, poured cod liver oil over the bodies and set fire to the farm. It was a brutal and calculated murder.

Friðrik and Agnes were sentenced to death and to be executed by beheading.  The execution took place at Þrístapar on January 12th, 1830 near the main road, the Ring Road, and all farmers in the administrative district were obligated to attend. In a tiny community mainly composed of regular farmers and ordinary people, authorities had difficulty finding an executioner. In the end, the victim's brother Guðmundur Ketilsson was forced to take on the task of beheading two people. 

Before her execution Agnes was incarcerated in Storaborg. 

Then Agnes was held in Kolnsa where Jon and his family lived. 

In the novel there are a lot of references to badstofa, which I can tell is some kind of common bedroom. The baðstofa is where people worked, ate, and slept, with each bed generally being shared by two people. The rooms were usually very small due to a lack of firewood for heating.

Agnes makes reference to the sagas she enjoys reading. The sagas of Icelanders are one sub-genre  of Icelandic sagas. They are prose narratives mostly based on historical events that mostly took place in Iceland in the ninth, tenth, and early eleventh centuries, during the so-called Saga Age. They were written in Old Icelandic, a western dialect of Old Norse. They are the best-known specimens of Icelandic literature.