Oera Linda Book

Common card · No. 452589

The Oera Linda Book is a manuscript written in imitated 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 considered to be a hoax or a fabrication. 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, hence it is unknown whether the intention was to produce a pseudepigraphical hoax, a parody, or simply an exercise in poetic fantasy. Historian Goffe Jensma published a monograph on the manuscript in 2004...

Read on Wikipedia · Image Cornelis over de Linden (1811-1874)?, Public domain