Gjesling
Encyclopedia
Gjesling was an old family at Vågå
Vågå
Vågå is a municipality in Oppland county, Norway. It is part of the traditional region of Gudbrandsdal. The administrative centre of the municipality is the village of Vågåmo....

 in Oppland
Oppland
is a county in Norway, bordering Sør-Trøndelag, Møre og Romsdal, Sogn og Fjordane, Buskerud, Akershus, Oslo and Hedmark. The county administration is in Lillehammer. Oppland is, together with Hedmark, one of the only two landlocked counties of Norway....

, Norway
Norway
Norway , officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic unitary constitutional monarchy whose territory comprises the western portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula, Jan Mayen, and the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard and Bouvet Island. Norway has a total area of and a population of about 4.9 million...

.

In 1130 Ivar Gjesling was the earliest-known owner of the farm Sandbu (just north of Vågåmo) in Vågå. He served as King Magnus IV's lendmann (governor) for the Opplands. Ivar Gjesling, allied himself with the Birchlegs (Birkebeiner
Birkebeiner
The Birkebein Party or Birkebeinar was the name for a rebellious party in Norway, formed in 1174 around the pretender to the Norwegian throne, Eystein Meyla...

ne) — who chose Sverre as their king at Øreting in 1177. Sverre granted him the valley of Heidal
Heidal
Heidal is a valley and parish within Gudbrandsdalen valley, in the county of Oppland, Norway.-History:Heidal parish was separated from Vågå as a separate municipality of its own on January 1, 1908. It was merged with the municipality of Sel on January 1, 1965.Heidal is a side valley of Gudbrandsdalen...

 as a reward.

Sigrid Undset
Sigrid Undset
Sigrid Undset was a Norwegian novelist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1928.-Biography:Undset was born in Kalundborg, Denmark, but her family moved to Norway when she was two years old. In 1924, she converted to Catholicism and became a lay Dominican...

's fictional Lady Ragnfrid, wife of Lavrans, was create a Gjesling from Sandbu.

Gjesling descendants still own land in the Vågå region, Riddersandbu, which includes buildings built before 1600.
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