The Bjølstad Farm () is a farm in Heidal in the municipality of

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Innlandet Innlandet is a Counties of Norway, county in Norway. It was created on 1 January 2020 with the merger of the old counties of Oppland and Hedmark (Jevnaker Municipality and Lunner Municipality were transferred to the neighboring county of Viken ( ...

county A county () is a geographic region of a country used for administrative or other purposesL. Brookes (ed.) '' Chambers Dictionary''. Edinburgh: Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd, 2005. in some nations. The term is derived from the Old French denoti ...

Norway Norway, officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic countries, Nordic country located on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. The remote Arctic island of Jan Mayen and the archipelago of Svalbard also form part of the Kingdom of ...

. 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 had 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, 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 ...

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 Vikings, Viking settlements further afield—particularly in the British Isles and Iceland—during the Viking Age of the 8th-11th ...

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

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