[4] Today, he is primarily known for the poetry and short story collection De Lapekoer fan Gabe Skroar, which he wrote with his brother Eeltsje, publishing the first edition in 1822.

[6][9] Justus Hiddes Halbertsma was born on 23 October 1789 in the village of Grou, in the central part of the Dutch province of Friesland,[1][2][10][3] in the house of his parents on Kowemerk ("Cow Market") street.

[11] He was the eldest son of the baker and small-time merchant[12][13][14] Hidde Joasts Halbertsma (1756–1809)[12][3][15] and his wife Ruerdtsje (or Riurtk)[11] Tsjallings Binnerts (1767–1809).

[1] As a father, Halbertsma experienced a large amount of grief, as his son Petrus died in 1851 in a psychiatric hospital, while Binnert passed away in 1861, and Hidde took his own life in 1865.

[1] Halbertsma had been greatly influenced in his student years by his acquaintance with the well-to-do and influential Amsterdam merchant Jeronimo de Vries, who championed a national art, inspired by the Dutch Golden Age.

[28] As Halbertsma remained the editor of Eeltsje's work for his entire life, their poetry and short fiction were strongly connected and published together from the very beginning.

[40] That said, Halbertsma's short stories were much more acute thanks to his limber use of language, his lively style of writing, and the fact that he refused to mince his words, leading to a rough, scoffing, and sometimes darkly grim atmosphere.

[10][2] His subject-matter Halbertsma collected from various sources, including German and French oral literature, which he matchlessly revised and placed in Friesland.

[38][31] From the anecdotes of people who knew or met him, he emerges as a sharp-witted and extremely diligent man of capacious erudition who was a droll story-teller.

[13] It Boalserter Nut ("The Bolsward Utility" – the name of a gentlemen's club), which was published in De Lapekoer, was Halbertsma's first short story of a more extended length.

[41] The only time Halbertsma wrote a literary work entirely without the participation of Eeltsje, was in 1837, when he published Oan Eölus ("To Aeolus"),[42] a story inspired by a great storm in 1830, in which a tornado has blown thoughts and motifs together like whirling leaves.

[43] Oan Eölus could perhaps be seen as a clue that Halbertsma harboured greater literary aspirations than would fit in the De Lapekoer fan Gabe Skroar.

[44] More than fifty years he laboured to complete his dictionary of Western Frisian titled Lexicon Frisicum, for which he chose Latin as the descriptive language, but it remained unfinished.

He organised it along the lines of the German dictionary by the Brothers Grimm, but became enmeshed in the addition of insertions and in reworkings, and in writing long semantic etymologies, a part of the work for which he especially had a predilection.

[47][9][13][3][15] Shortly after returning to Friesland from his study in Amsterdam, friends from his student years who by then were occupying important posts within the civil service, introduced him to the social circles around the Frisian-minded provincial governor jonker Idsert Aebinga van Humalda.

[44] In part because of his linguistic erudition, Halbertsma has been named as the author of the infamous Oera Linda Book,[25] a falsified work which emerged in 1867 and was written in imitated Old Frisian.

[48] However, it is considered much more likely that the true author of the Oera Linda Book was the librarian Eelco Verwijs, who lead the Provincial Library of Friesland and who had befriended Halbertsma,[49][50] or possibly the writer François Haverschmidt or the ship carpenter and self-taught freethinker Cornelis over de Linden.

[49] After his retirement, on 26 October 1856,[3] which Halbertsma applied for himself because his heart was not in his duties as a minister anymore,[3] he withdrew into his upstairs apartment, where from that point on he became increasingly more lonely as his family members and friends died away, although his foreign contacts through correspondence remained intact.

[1] In 1947, the Dr. Joast Halbertsma Award, the highest provincial decoration in the field of historical (and later more general scientific) research concerning the province of Friesland was named in his honour.

[38] After the death of all three Brothers Halbertsma, their short fiction and poetry was gathered under the supervision of librarian and archivist Gerben Colmjon and bookseller and historian Wopke Eekhoff.

[7][6][13][32][52] This work is now thought of as the national book of Western Frisian literature,[6] and although the literary value of this collection was later disputed by some critics,[8] it is undeniable that Rimen en Teltsjes and its predecessor De Lapekoer fan Gabe Skroar played a role of crucial importance in the development of a new literary tradition after Frisian had been used almost exclusively as a spoken language for three centuries.

[25][35] This provided him with the idea to transfer his own collection of antiquities (originating for a major part in Hindeloopen,[2] while the remainder came mostly from excavations of Frisian terps)[35] to the Province of Friesland.