Joast Hiddes Halbertsma (Grou/Grouw 1789 – Deventer 1869) was born into a well-established Frisian family and, after his theological studies, became a Liberal-Mennonite clergyman first in Bolsward and then in Deventer. He was among the most authoritative cultural producers in Frisian in the first half of the century. His native knowledge and academically-based understanding of Frisian – which was, after Rask’s Frisisk sproglere of 1825, attracting comparative-philological interest in the taxonomic calibration of the Nordic, Anglo-Saxon and Continental-West-Germanic language clusters – gained him international standing among philologists. These included Rask, Jacob Grimm (with whom he corresponded, and who inspired his lexicographical work for Frisian) and Joseph Bosworth (then based as a clergyman in Rotterdam and, following his Leiden PhD of 1831, preparing his Dictionary of the Anglo-Saxon Language, 1838); Halbertsma contributed a description of Frisian or “Friesic” to his work on Anglo-Saxon (1836). Halbertsma also made a translation of the Gospel of Matthew for Lucien Bonaparte in 1858. He participated in Jacob Grimm’s Germanisten congress of 1846, but returned with deep reservations about what he considered the Germanists’ expansionist attitude towards the Netherlands. He fully endorsed the Dutch national self-ethnotype of a spirit of egalitarian independence, and saw this characteristic at it highest intensity in the Frisian population.

Within the Netherlands, Halbertsma was among the formative admirers of the Frisian Baroque poet Gysbert Japix, whom he commemorated as a literary luminary as early as 1822, and on whom he drew as a stylistic and orthographic example. He also wrote antiquarian and religious-historical disquisitions, and a philological commentary on the medieval Dutch poet Maerlant. While this earned him nationwide standing as a man of letters, it was insufficiently specialized to secure him a professorial chair in one of the Dutch universities. (There were no universities within the Friesland province at the time.)

Within Friesland, his importance is linked not only to the canonicity of Japix, but mainly to the light tales and verses that he and his brother Eeltsje Halbertsma collected for popular usage. Their collection De lapekoer fen Gabe Skroar (“The rag-basket of Gabe the tailor”), intended to bolster literacy in Frisian among the simple folk, initially appeared in 1822 and gradually, following repeated reprints and expansions, also incorporating collaborations with their third brother Tsjalling Halbertsma, gained such a wide readership that it became a classic in popular Frisian reading material under the collective title Rimen en teltsjes (“Rhymes and tales”, 1871).