1830: Agnus Magnusdottir and Fridrik Sigurdsson, Iceland’s last executions

Iceland last used the death penalty on January 12, 1830 with the beheading of farm servants Agnes Magnusdottir and Fridrik Sigurdsson.

Only threadbare details survive to posterity about their crime: one night in 1828, Agnes roused a neighboring farm to give the alarm that Natan Ketilsson's farmhouse, where she worked, was afire. 

Neighbors were able to quench the blaze quickly enough to realize that Ketilsson himself had not died because he was trapped in the flame -- but because he had been stabbed to death, along with another man known as a criminal, Petur Jonsson.

Agnes, 33, and teenager Fridrik were arrested for murder and eventually beheaded on a desolate hill on the frozen northern coast where a mossed-over stone still silently marks the spot.*

Why were these men killed? If the stones remember, they aren't telling and in the scantiness of documentation the job has fallen to literature instead, for there is something to be said for an unexplained double murder in the ashes of a half-burned farm and the novelty of a woman being the very last human to have her head chopped off in Iceland. (On execution day, Fridrik went first.)

Burial Rites, by Hannah Kent

Agnes was Natan's lover, but the farmer had a reputation for womanizing and, so all suspect, eyes for Fridrik's young girlfriend;** the inference of a jealous domestic psychodrama perfectly cast on the fringe of the Arctic Sea, of chilly twilit tables gathering furtive eyes above with wandering hands below, seems hard to resist. And then there was the strange coda, while verdicts were sent to Denmark for confirmation,† of the condemned simply living and working among the community waiting to execute them. Nineteenth century rural Iceland was a little short on jail cells and surplus provisions.

After studying on an exchange program in Iceland, Australian Hannah Kent found this speculative environment a rich source for her well-received first novel, Burial Rites. (There's a lengthy and interesting podcast interview with her by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation here.)

Kent's drama has made headway in Hollywood, with Jennifer Lawrence said to be keen on playing the tragic lead; if it someday does hit the silver screen, however, it won't even be the first on its subject matter -- witness the 1995 film Agnes.

The criminals Fridrik Sigurdsson and Agnes Magnusdottir were today moved out of custody to the place of execution, and following them to the execution site were the priests Reverend Tomasson and Reverend Thorvardur Jonsson, an assistant priest. The criminals had wished that the latter two help them prepare for their deaths. After the priest Johann Tomasson completed a speech of admonition to the convict Fridrik Sigurdsson, Fridrik's head was taken off with one blow of the axe. The farmer Gudmundur Ketilsson,‡ who had been ordered to be executioner, committed the work that he had been asked to do with dexterity and fearlessness. The criminal Agnes Magnusdottir, who, while this was taking place, had been kept at a remote station where she could not see the site of execution, was then fetched. After the Assistant Reverend Thorvardur Jonsson had appropriately prepared her for death, the same executioner cut off her head, and with the same craftsmanship as before. The lifeless heads were then set upon two stakes at the site of execution, and their bodies put in two coffins of untreated boards, and buried before the men were dismissed. While the deed took place, and there until it was finished, everything was appropriately quiet and well-ordered, and it was concluded by a short address by Reverend Magnus Arnason to those that were there. 

Actum ut supra. 

B. Blondal, R. Olsen, A. Arnason

(From the Magistrate's Book of Hunavatn District, 1830 -- as quoted in the epilogue of Kent's Burial Rites) 

* The milestone murderers, or at least their heads, rest in Tjörn.

** This young woman, Sigridur Gudmundsdottir, was condemned to death with the other two but got to keep her head in the end.

† Iceland did not become independent of Denmark until 1944.

‡ The victim's brother was the executioner.

Source: ExecutedToday.com, January 13, 2017

➤ Related article: Burial Rites: Hannah Kent's meticulously researched historical novel tells of the final months of the last woman executed in Iceland, The Guardian, August 28, 2013

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