Oera Linda

The Oera Linda Book is a manuscript written in a form of Old Frisian, purporting to cover historical, mythological, and religious themes of remote antiquity, from 2194 BCE to 803 CE. Among academics in Germanic philology, the document is widely considered to be a hoax or forgery.

The manuscript first came to public awareness in the 1860s. In 1872, Jan Gerhardus Ottema published a Dutch translation and defended it as genuine. Over the next few years there was a heated public controversy, but by 1879 it was universally accepted that the text was a recent composition. Nevertheless, a public controversy was revived in the context of 1930s Nazi occultism, and the book is still occasionally brought up in esotericism and Atlantis literature. The manuscript's author is not known with certainty, and it is hence unknown whether the intention was to produce a hoax, a parody or simply an exercise in poetic fantasy.

Historian Goffe Jensma published a monograph on the manuscript in 2004, De gemaskerde god ("The Masked God"), including a new translation and a discussion of the history of its reception. Jensma concludes that it was probably intended as a "hoax to fool some nationalist Frisians and orthodox Christians", as well as an "experiential exemplary exercise" by Dutch theologian and poet François Haverschmidt.

The Oera Linda Book, known in Old Frisian as Thet Oera Linda Bok, came to light in 1867 when Cornelis Over de Linden (1811–1874) handed the manuscript, which he claimed to have inherited from his grandfather, via his aunt, over to Eelco Verwijs (1830–1880), the provincial librarian of Friesland, for translation and publication. Verwijs rejected the manuscript, but in 1872 Jan Gerhardus Ottema (1804–1879), a prominent member of the Frisian Society for History and Culture, published a Dutch translation. Ottema believed it to be written in authentic Old Frisian. The book was subsequently translated into English by William Sandbach in 1876, and published by Trübner & Co. of London.

Within the first few years after the appearance of the Oera Linda Book, its recent origin was established not only based on the exceptional claims being made, but also because of a number of anachronisms it contained. The text was nevertheless a source of inspiration for a number of occultists and speculative historians. While there was some debate among Dutch academics and in a number of newspapers about the book's authenticity during the 1870s, by 1879 it was widely recognized as a forgery.

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