The Tynning Farm and Brekke

Brekke lies on the south side of the Sognefjord, near its mouth, where the fjord meets the sea. It was a municipality of its own from 1905 to 1964, when it became part of Gulen, and today belongs to Vestland county. People lived off the land, the fjord and the forest: smallholdings on the hillsides, summer dairying at the mountain pastures, and sprat fishing – fishermen with Sundays off would climb to the pastures to meet the dairymaids.

The village had its own savings bank from 1882 (Brekke og Lavik Sparebank, where great-grandfather Isak sat on the board for 28 years), its own youth society from 1919 (founded by grandfather Lasse, with grandmother Åshild as its second chair) and its own power cooperative from 1943. And Brekke was the kingdom of the name Lasse: in the 1910 census, thirteen men and boys in the village were named Lasse, two of them at Tynning.

Tynning (farm no. 56) appears in the tax rolls as early as 1563, when "Jens po Thønningh" paid one riksdaler in tax and owned land as a freeholder. In 1611 the farm was split in two, and in 1647 Barbro Lassesdotter received land from her brother Johannes – the origin of the holding our family works today. For more than a century, judges in Bergen and the noble Knagenhielm family owned the land while the Tynning farmers were tenants. In 1803 Johannes Olson Asheim bought the holding for 350 riksdaler, and with the allodial deed of 1812 the family became freeholders.

The records hold drama too: between 1798 and 1809 the neighbouring holding lost three sons on the fjord, the last a soldier on his way to Lavik. In 1803 the schoolmaster Gullak Lasseson capsized with a load of brushwood and was rescued. With the land consolidation of 1864–65 the old shared farmyard was dissolved and the houses moved.

Lasse Matiasson belongs to the generation that developed the farm through the nineteenth century. The parish history says that he "ditched, cleared and cultivated". He lived to the age of 98 and forms the first link in the close family line: Lasse Matiasson Tynning → Isak Tynning → Lasse Tynning.

His son Isak Tynning (1875–1960) took over in 1897. He cultivated 40–50 decares of new land, dug kilometres of ditches and held "most of the offices a parish has to offer". Isak's son Lasse Tynning was born on the farm in 1898 and later carried the family name to Eidanger.

In 1940 Isak's son Tormod took over the Tynning farm; he later became mayor of Brekke and wrote the savings bank's centenary history. The farm is still in the family.

Haymaking on the steep hillsides, winter journeys by horse and sleigh, and Sundays on the fjord with accordions: this was the working year and the everyday life around Tynning between the wars, as caught by Botolv H. Tynning's camera.

From the late 1920s Isak built up Tynning planteskule – plum and apple trees, berry bushes and ornamental shrubs, raised in the coastal climate and therefore hardy. The nursery advertised in newspapers from Sogn to Møre, was listed in the Norwegian nursery directory (1940) and Norsk hagetidend (1941), and in 1945 Isak wrote the article "Fruit growing in coastal districts", published as a book as late as 2024. Sogns Avis called him in 1945 "first and foremost a self-taught man".

In 1927 people on the farm found a Stone Age pickaxe while digging a ditch. Grandfather Lasse took it to Bergen and handed it to Professor Shetelig; today it is kept at the University Museum of Bergen (B7815, "gift from Isak Tynning"). People have lived at Tynning for four thousand years.

Grandmother Åshild came from the neighbouring farm Øvre Haugland, an old manor farm with burial mounds and a medieval chapel, which burned in 1814. Her father, Torstein Hansson Haugland, was "a capable and enterprising farmer", a council member and chairman of the school board. Åshild was the eldest of thirteen siblings. And the families were already intertwined: two brothers from Haugland had married two sisters from Tynning in 1863 and 1864 – making Lasse and Åshild second cousins, twice over.