Oera Linda Book

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 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, 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, De gemaskerde god (The Masked God), including a discussion of the history of its reception and a new translation in 2006. 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. He suggests that "the average well-educated nineteenth-century reader must have been able to translate the text if he wanted to. The pains of learning to read this language was to be rewarded with linguistic delicacies like the hundreds of puns, popular etymologies and funny words that were derived from almost every modern European language. When they were weary, the folksmothers for instance could retire to their ‘BEDRVM’ (bedroom)."