Gertrud Rask

Memorial plaque with portraits for Hans Egede and Gertrud Rask at the Sankt Nikolai Church in Copenhagen

Gertrud Rask (* around 1673 at Vebostad Farm, Kveøy Island, Kvæfjord Parish, in Northern Norway ; † December 21, 1735 in Godthåb / Greenland ) was the first wife of the Danish-Norwegian Greenland missionary Hans Egede and mother of the missionary Paul Egede and the merchant Niels Egede .

Life

Gertrud Rask (recorded in the church book as Gjertrud Nilsdatter Rasch ) was the third of six children of Niels Nielsen Rasch (around 1641–1704) and Nille Nilsdatter († around 1716). She grew up shaped by the harsh nature of Northern Norway. In 1707 she married Hans Egede, the 13 years younger pastor of the Lofoten island Vaagen, to whom she had four children Paul (1709–1789), Niels (1710–1782), Kirstine Matthea (1715–1786) and Petronelle (1716–1786) in Kvæfjord. 1805) gave birth.

Initially, she opposed her husband's plans for the Greenland mission, which took concrete form by 1710 at the latest, but finally bowed to his will. In 1718 the couple moved with their children to Bergen and from there, after the end of the Northern War , sailed to Greenland on May 12, 1721, on whose west coast they arrived on July 3, 1721. The remains of the house in which the couple lived together with around 25 people from 1721 to 1728 are still preserved today.

Gertrud Rask, herself a pietist , supported her husband in missionary work among the local Inuit and worked as a nurse. A smallpox epidemic brought in by a Danish ship in 1733 finally caught up with Gertrud, who died of it in 1735. Deeply saddened, her husband traveled back to Denmark with her remains in 1736 . Gertrud Rask, like Hans Egede in 1758, was buried in the St. Nikolai cemetery in Copenhagen .

Roads in Greenland and Denmark, an ice-going ship built in 1923 , a church in Qaqortoq , a children's home, a gourmet restaurant in Nuuk and a region in the far north of Greenland ( Gertrud-Rask-Land in the northwest of Pearyland ) are named after Gertrud Rask .

literature

• Heinrich Müller: Hans Egede and his wife among the pagan Greenlanders. A beautiful picture of life for young and old. Eyraud, Neuhaldensleben 1832, tu-bs.de
• Hans Egede: The heathen in the ice. As a researcher and missionary in Greenland 1721–1736. Thienemann, Edition Erdmann, Stuttgart a. a. 1986, ISBN 3-522-60150-5 (old adventurous travel reports).
• Ms. Nielsen: Egede, Hans Poulsen . In: Carl Frederik Bricka (Ed.): Dansk biografisk Lexikon. Tillige omfattende Norge for Tidsrummet 1537-1814. 1st edition. tape 4 : Clemens – Eynden . Gyldendalske Boghandels Forlag, Copenhagen 1890, p. 423-431 (Danish, runeberg.org ).