Gertrud Rask (1673 – 21 December 1735) was the first wife of the Danish-Norwegian missionary to Greenland Hans Egede and was the mother of the missionary and translator Paul Egede.
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Gertrud Rask (the parish register records her as Gjertrud Nilsdatter Rasch) was born at Kveøy, Troms, Norway, the third of six children of Niels Nielsen Rasch (1641–1704) und Nille Nilsdatter (d. 1716). Growing up in the harsh climate of northern Norway, she was 34 when she married Hans Egede, the 21-year-old pastor of Vågan in the Lofoten archipelago. They had four children - Paul (1709–1789), Niels (1710–1782), Kirstine Matthea (1715–1786) and Petronelle (1716–1805).[1]
Her husband's determination to establish a Greenland mission had become firm by 1710 at the latest; Gertrud Rask Egede strongly resisted his plan initially, but eventually she bent to his will after he promised not to go to Greenland without her.
In 1718 the couple and their children moved to Bergen, from which - at the conclusion of the Great Northern War - they set sail for Greenland on the 12th of May 1721, arriving on that island's west coast on the 3rd of July. The remains of the house where the family lived together with about 25 other people from 1721 till 1728 are still preserved.
Despite her strong Pietist bias, she supported her husband's missionary work among the Inuit people, working among them as a nurse. In 1733, the Moravian Church missionaries of Nicolaus Zinzendorf (known then as the Herrnhuter Brüdergemeine) arrived on a Danish ship and were allowed to establish New Herrnhut, south of Godthåb (now Nuuk). One of the Moravians, however, had contracted smallpox and spread the disease to many of the Inuit, who had had no previous contact with smallpox and other diseases of Europe. A 1734 smallpox epidemic among the Inuit in Godthåb claimed the life of Gertrud Egede the following year.
In 1736 her husband brought her body to Denmark for burial at the St. Nikolai Church in Copenhagen (now Kunsthallen Nikolaj) where Egede himself was buried on his death in 1758.
Roads in both Greenland and Denmark, a church in Qaqortoq (then known as Julianehåb), a children's home and a restaurant in Nuuk have all been named after Gertrud Rask.
An icebreaking steamship, the Gertrude Rask, was launched in Nakskov, Denmark in 1923. The 47-metre ship was used for Greenlandic trade and for several exploration trips from Copenhagen to Greenland, but sank off Nova Scotia in 1942.