[9][2] Tsjalling Hiddes Halbertsma was born on 21 January 1792[1][2] in his parents' house on Kowemerk ("Cow Market") street[10] in the village of Grou, in the central part of the Dutch province of Friesland.

When it was time for business, all of the joking stopped, and then activity, policy, hard work and calculations were the order of the day from early in the morning to late in the evening.

"[1] One of his biographers (J. P. Wiersma) described Tsjalling Halbertsma as "a talented, conspicuous person, full of drollery, not without vanity, but original in thought and word, distinctive in all his doings, a trendsetter.

Justus, the eldest brother, was in Amsterdam at that time, studying to become a minister,[6] while Eeltsje, the youngest, was boarding in the provincial capital of Leeuwarden, where he attended the Latin school.

[5][6] At that time farmer's wives churned and made cheese at the farmstead, selling their products to merchants who traded it away, not seldom to foreign markets.

[5][23] At first he worked on commission for the Amsterdam trading house of Pijnakker, but later on, he went into business for himself, buying up dairy products in Friesland and selling them with considerable profit in London.

[1] But in the end Halbertsma miscalculated badly: when the shares in other businesses he had invested in dropped sharply in value in 1848, he panicked, sold out, and put all his money in rye.

[25][23] Halbertsma's literary works were always overshadowed to a large degree by those of his brothers Justus and Eeltsje;[25] they consist of folk literature, often with a satirical or playful motif,[25][23] which, however, was very popular with the common man.

[1] Furthermore, it is known that, even before his brothers Justus and Eeltsje published their De Lapekoer fan Gabe Skroar in 1822, Tsjalling Halbertsma also wrote small tales and poems for a society in Grou.

[11] Gerard Tjaard Nicolaas Suringar himself would assert years later that De Bêste Freed yn Ljou'ter Merke ("The Best Friday of the Fair in Leeuwarden") was the first piece by Halbertsma which he had published, but he must have been mistaken, as it can be clearly shown from Justus Hiddes Halbertsma's letters that De Bêste Freed appeared in Suringar's Almanak of 1830.

"[15][23][28] 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][2][31][12][32][30] Apart from a few of his poems and his part in De Skearwinkel fan Joutebaas ("Boss Joute's Barbershop"), Tsjalling Halbertsma works, however, remained outside of that collection.

[9][2] Today, Rimen en Teltsjes is seen as the national book of Western Frisian literature,[31][12] and although the literary value of this collection was later disputed by some critics,[33] 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 Western Frisian had been used almost exclusively as a spoken language for three centuries.