The Bjølstad Farm ( no, Bjølstad gård) is a farm in

Heidal Heidal or Heidalen is a valley in Sel Municipality in Innlandet county, Norway. The U-shaped valley follows the river Sjoa which begins in the nearby Jotunheimen mountains eastward until it joins the Gudbrandsdalslågen river in the main va ...

in the municipality of

Sel Sel is a municipality in Innlandet county, Norway. It is located in the traditional district of Gudbrandsdal. The administrative centre of the municipality is the town of Otta. The municipality also includes several notable villages including ...

Innlandet Innlandet is a county in Norway. It was created on 1 January 2020 with the merger of the old counties of Oppland and Hedmark (the municipalities of Jevnaker and Lunner were transferred to the neighboring county of Viken on the same date). The ...

county A county is a geographic region of a country used for administrative or other purposes Chambers Dictionary, L. Brookes (ed.), 2005, Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd, Edinburgh in certain modern nations. The term is derived from the Old French ...

Norway Norway, officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic country in Northern Europe, the mainland territory of which comprises the western and northernmost portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula. The remote Arctic island of Jan Mayen and the ...

. The farm was mentioned in written sources as early as 1270. Eirik Bjørnsson, who gradually purchased the farm in the 1430s, was the ancestor of the Bratt family, who lived at the farm for many generations. By 1680 it had developed into a scattered farming settlement with more than 26 leased-out properties and 700 buildings. One of its larger properties is the farm named Søre Lykkja ('South Lykkja'), also known as Bjølstadløkken, to the northwest. The Veslesetra property also belongs to the farm. In 1904 the farm had of cultivated land and of forest. The farm is privately owned. The Bjølstad Chapel, now relocated at

Heidal Church Heidal Church ( no, Heidal kyrkje) is a parish church of the Church of Norway in Sel Municipality in Innlandet county, Norway. It is located in the village of Bjølstad, in Heidal, a side valley of the main Gudbrandsdalen valley. It is the church ...

, is a timber-framed structure dating from 1531 that can accommodate 75 people. Its doorposts are believed to date from an earlier

stave church A stave church is a medieval wooden Christian church building once common in north-western Europe. The name derives from the building's structure of post and lintel construction, a type of timber framing where the load-bearing ore-pine posts ar ...

and are decorated with

Urnes Style Viking art, also known commonly as Norse art, is a term widely accepted for the art of Scandinavian Norsemen and Viking settlements further afield—particularly in the British Isles and Iceland—during the Viking Age of the 8th-11th centurie ...

carvings. For a time, the chapel was defunct and used as a stable and barn. Nine buildings at the Bjølstad Farm received protected status under the Cultural Heritage Act of 1920. The farm served as the site where the 1959 Austrian film '' Und ewig singen die Wälder'' (The Forests Sing Forever) was filmed. It was based on Trygve Gulbranssen's 1933 book ''Og bakom synger skogene'' (Beyond Sing the Woods). In 1970, to mark the 850th anniversary of the Bratt family, over 2,000 members of the Bratt family met at a reunion at the farm and set up a memorial stone there. A separate illustrated chapter is dedicated to Bjølstad in the 1882 travelogue '' Three in Norway (by Two of Them)'':

References

External links

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Bjølstad Farm at the Directorate for Cultural Heritage website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Bjolstad Farm Buildings and structures in Innlandet Cultural heritage of Norway Farms in Innlandet