About Bremsnes

The history

Bremsnes Tingsted

Few intact stone circles remain in Møre & Romsdal County, and this one in Bremsnes is by the far most well preserved.  Excavated stone circles in Norway and Sweden have often been shown to contain Iron Age burial pits ranging from 200 B.C. to 700 A.D. but will additionally have had local as well as regional administrative and judicial purposes.

 Such circles are usually referred to as a ”Tingsted”, ”Tingkrets” or ”Dommaringar”. ”Ting” meaning a Viking court or a local administrative gathering. The Gulating-Law (Norwegian Viking parliamentary legislation dating from circa 900 A.D. and in use until circa 1300 A.D.) states that all ”Tingsted” should be circular in shape. They usually consist of evenly spaced standing stones forming a circle, often with additional central or externally placed stones. The Bremsnes stone circle consists of a total of 11 standing stones. Eight stones form a circle with a diameter of circa 10.5 meters, two stones outside the circle mark an East facing entrance/exit and one bigger, oblong stone with a concave indentation on top sits in the center.

Within the region there are references to stone circles located  in Kvernes (Averøy), Tornes (Fræna), Øygårdneset (Tingvoll) and in Setnes (Rauma). At Bolsøya in Molde there have been found remains of one stone circle while another has been removed. What all these locations have in common is that they were major local and regional settlements at the time and that most of these Viking age cheiftan farms were eventually converted to church locations during the middle ages.

Bremsnes is conveniently located on the old inner shipping route between Trondheim and Bergen and the site would in the Viking age have had many topographical advantages. A cairn/beacon watch with clear views up and down the coast was established on ”Bremsneshatten” to survey shipping lanes and warn of attacks. Bremsnes Farm (still an active farmstead to this day) was a chieftain seat of great political and financial importance and could most likely muster several ”leidang” ships, making up a fleet  of levied troops that would contribute to local defences as well as being part of expeditionary forces. Several slipways have been found on the farms land and excavations near Bremsnes church in 1673 turned up, amongst other things, a glass jar containing funerary ashes and two golden rings that now can be found in the National museum in Copenhagen.

Bremsnes in the Sagas

In Snorri Sturlasonds Sagas (Flatøtbok Volume II, page 426) it is told that the great athletye and bard, Asbjørn Prude vas viciously murdered by a man named Bruse of Bremsesgård and that Prudes blood-brother, Orm Storolfsson from Iceland avenged the deed.

In 872 A.D. Harald Fair-hair gathered Norway into one kingdom after the battle of Hafrsfjord. According to the sagas, Gyda Eiriksdatter from Hordaland had refused to marry him ten years earlier unless he ruled all of Norway. Harald then swore an oath to neither cut nor groom neither hair nor beard until he had subjugated the entire country. Haralds ally, Ragnvald Earl of Møre, had his seat in Bremsnes (Flatøtbok Volume III, page 29) and according to local lore it was at Bremsnes Tingsted that Harald finally cut his hair after becoming the first king of a united Norway.