28. Dynjandi

At Dynjandi there was still a prayer house in the beginning of the 18th century according to Jardabók, but it said that services had not been held there for half a century or longer. There were eleven people living at Dynjandi in 1703, and one more in 1801 when there were three farms on the land. The owners in 1703 were the brothers Pastor Gísli Hannessson of Snæfjöll and Benedikt Hannesson at Hóll in Bolungarvík. The brothers also owned Tyrdilmýri on the Snæfjallaströnd coast together; Gísli also owned Snæfjallastadur.

Benedikt Benediktsson and Rósa Elíasdóttir built the first wooden house in Grunnavíkurhreppur parish at Fremribær in 1906. For a while they ran a branch of the storeÁsgeirsverslun down by the sea below Dynjandi. Living at the same time as them at Nedribær were EInar Bæringsson and Engilrád, Benedikt's sister. Their sons, Alexander and Jóhannes, were the final residents of Nedribær; they moved away with their families in 1948. Jóhannes and his wife, Rebekka Pálsdóttir of Höfdi, moved to Bæir on the Snæfjallaströnd coast.

The last people to live at Dynjandi were Hallgrímur Jónsson and Kristín Benediktsdóttir, the daughter of Benedikt, who was midwife for Grunnavíkurhreppur parish the entire time from 1922 to 1962. They moved to Sætún in Grunnavík in the spring of 1952 where they lived for ten years, and were among the last people to leave. Hallgrímur wrote the book Saga stríds og starfa (The Story of Battle and Work) about his life with Kristín in Grunnavík for over half a century.

There is an old deserted farm mentioned in Jardabók as being on the land at Dynjandi, Öldugil, at the base of Leirufjördur fjord. It is believed that the farm was abandoned in the 15th century or so, in a time of glacial eruptions and flooding.

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