From another
thread there was:
According to the book "Chronicles of Ura Linda" (Oera Linda Boek), there were three virgins: Freya (white), Finda (yellow) and Lida (black). Their descendants worshiped each of their mothers, and this was millennia before our modern patriarchal "father" cult.
Why do you think we can trust Oera Linda as a source on this particular issue? Perhaps I should have waited for a response, but I went ahead and tried to find something.
Before I got into reading this thread in more details, I consulted various Wikis and read some pages in the
book itself.
The English Wiki has about the origin:
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.
The
Swedish Wiki mentions, if we translate:
In 1876, high school teacher Beckering Vinckers wrote a devastating critique of this 'clumsy forgery written in idiocy.' Ottema hung himself, and there was silence around the book.
If that is true, then Ottema must have hung himself in 1879, at the age of 75. This was three years after the publication of Vinckers work. What did Ottema think of the book after the criticism? And what did Eelco Verwijs (1830–1880) think? He lived only one year longer.
The English Wiki also mentions:
Among those who doubt the book's authenticity, the most popular candidates for the author of the manuscript are Cornelis Over de Linden or Eelco Verwijs. A recent third choice is the Protestant preacher
François Haverschmidt (1835–1894), well known for writing poetry under the pseudonym Piet Paaltjens. Haverschmidt lived in Friesland and was an acquaintance of Verwijs.
[9]
Goffe Jensma (2004) argued that Haverschmidt was the main writer of the book, with the help of Over de Linden and Verwijs. According to Jensma, Haverschmidt intended the Oera Linda Book as a parody of the
Christian Bible. An article in late 2007 by Jensma
[10] says that the three authors of the translation intended it "to be a temporary hoax to fool some nationalist Frisians and orthodox Christians and as an experiential exemplary exercise in reading the Holy Bible in a non-fundamentalist, symbolical way."
[11]
I looked up
François Haverschmidt (1835–1894), and it ended with another suicide.
He became a prime suspect for being the
anonymous author of the
Oera Linda Book,
[1] the inferred reason being a
practical joke[2] (a parody of the Bible to lampoon
fundamentalist Christians).
[3] However, many of his contemporaries believed the book to be authentic. This would have prevented Haverschmidt and his collaborators (if they were indeed the authors of the supposedly millennia-old text) from unmasking their hoax, which consequently completely backfired.
Haverschmidt became progressively more depressed, especially after his wife's death in 1891, and ultimately committed suicide in 1894.
That was one side of the argument.
The other claim about a more mysterious origin
In this thread there was
Leading to an article about the
Implausible hoax doctrine which says:
The most scholarly work published thus far about the Oera Linda-book was a dissertation by Goffe Jensma.(1) It presents a theory in which a triumvirate, backed by several co-conspirators, produced the manuscript in order to initially fool their intended audience and eventually, when their victims would have understood the prank, make a theological statement. A basic assumption of the study was that it had to be a 19th century fictional creation.
And:
The three creators would have been pastor and poet Haverschmidt (1835-1894), his friend the librarian and linguist Verwijs (1830-1880), and royal navy shipyard superintendent Over de Linden (1811-1874). While the first two were known to have been college friends, Haverschmidt would have had to get to know Over de Linden well enough in the 1.5 year (December 1862 to July 1864) that he was one of three pastors at the Den Helder parish of 9,300 members. Over de Linden was known to not be a church-goer, he was a generation older than the pastor, was (grand)father and remarried as a widower in May 1863. The 28 year old Haverschmidt got married in August 1863 and would one year later become father. Both will have had other things on their mind — not least of all to work for a living — than concocting a highly advanced (and potentially dangerous) mystification.
 | | Haverschmidt (1835-1894) |
|
 | | Verwijs (1830-1880) |
|
 | | Over de Linden (1811-1874) |
|
After the two supposedly would have gotten acquainted, they would have had to mostly work together with Verwijs through mail, as the pastor moved to Schiedam in 1864 and the linguist lived in Leeuwarden, hours of travel separating the three of them.
However, most implausible of all circumstances was that the intelligent and talented Verwijs would have risked not only losing his career, but also being criminally prosecuted. After all, having examined the manuscript in 1867, he initially concluded that it was "irrefutably authentic" and "an ancestral manuscript, copied many times",(1) asking the Frisian Provincial Executive permission to negotiate a purchase from the owner as well as funds to have it copied and translated.(2)
- Letters Verwijs to Over de Linden, October 13 and 19, 1867.
- 'Gedeputeerde Staten', the executive branch of government of a province in the Netherlands.
If the manuscript would have been intended to be obviously fake at second consideration, as Jensma theorized, Verwijs' request would have been unforgivable, if he had been complicit. And even if the three creators would have agreed to keep their teamwork a secret, would Verwijs have had reason to trust especially Over de Linden, whom he could hardly have gotten to know well and who, like he, was known to be a drinker and thus could easily have talked past his mouth?
[...] Jensma's three suspects all had a life. They were not hermits with unlimited time or resources. Even if they would have had the time and skills to create it, as well as the courage to possibly enrage the establishment, would they have taken the risk that the manuscript remained unnoticed? If Ottema had not translated and published it, hardly anyone would have known it ever existed. Would none of them have wanted any credit for it, if only posthumously?
And
Before theorizing about possible modern creators, it should first be compellingly proven that it cannot possibly be a 13th century copy, or a copy thereof. If it would be a 19th century fantasy, loosely based on a selection of sources, this should have become ever more evident in the last 150 years, but the opposite is the case.
Not exactly, the
Dutch Wiki has under
background for the theme of the book
Racial doctrine
Arthur de Gobineau (1816-1882) had written his Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines in 1853-1855, which influenced the 'ariosofie', the doctrine of superior and inferior races, that National Socialism would embrace. Gobineau described the same distinction between white, black and yellow races.
The above white, black and yellow is incidentally the colour of the goddesses. In the introduction, a talk given in 1871 to the copy I found:
The Oera Linda Book, from a Manuscript of the Thirteenth Century by J. G. Ottema et al.
there is:
The Frisian religion is extremely simple, and pure Monotheism. Wr-alda or Wr-alda’s spirit is the only eternal, unchangeable, perfect, and almighty being. Wr-alda has created everything. Out of him proceeds everything—first the beginning, then time, and afterwards Irtha, the Earth. Irtha bore three daughters—Lyda, Finda, and Frya—the mothers of the three distinct races, black, yellow, and white—Africa, Asia, and Europe. As such, Frya is the mother of Frya’s people, the Frieslanders. She is the representative of Wr-alda, and is reverenced accordingly. Frya has established her “Tex,” the first law, and has established the religion of the eternal light. The worship consists in the maintenance of a perpetually-burning lamp, foddik, by priestesses, virgins. At the head of the virgins in every town was a Burgtmaagd, and the chief of the Burgtmaagden was the Eeremoeder of the Fryasburgt of Texland.
Back to the
Wiki:
The ideas of the Oera Linda book:
Myths of origin
Throughout Europe, including the Frisian countries, myths of origin circulated in the Middle Ages, connecting biblical, classical and indigenous history. The Oera Linda book stands in that tradition of the 'apocryphal or fantastic historiography' and then makes fun of it. 13]
The dedication 'Okke my son' would refer to Ocko Scharlensis, who wrote the Warachtige Croniike (Croniicke ende warachtige beschrijvinghe van Vrieslant) in 1597. According to this book, Friso, who arrived in Staveren from India, was the mythical founder and namesake of Friesland in the year 313. According to Jensma, the narrative structure with its fictitious introverted narrators shows striking similarities with the Oera-Linda book.
The Oera-Linda-book describes the pre-history of Friso, who is also mentioned in 1741 by Willem van Haren in his epic Friso, koning der Gangariden en Prasiaten as 'lieutenant of Alexander the Great'. Already in the 17th century, Martin Hamconius had included the portrait of Friso in his Verthoninge der Coninghen, Bisschoppen, Princen, Potestaten, Heeren en Graven van Vrieslant.
In 1806, De Grave wrote Republique des Champs Elysées, 'a forerunner of the Ulysses book',
in which Homer was presented as a Belgian writer from Saint Omer and the history of the Iliad and Odyssey was set in the Netherlands and Belgium. Ulysses gave his name to Vlissingen, sorceress Circe her name to Zierikzee.[14]
Translated with
www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
Sunken land
In his Lebens- und Leidensgeschichte der Frisen from 1845, the German-minded publicist Knut Jungbohn Clement from Amrum sketched for the first time an image of a sunken Atlantis in the middle of the North Sea that would be the original homeland of the Frisians. The Frisian coastal areas are said to be the remains of an original Frisenmarsch south of the Dogger Bank, the largest part of which was swallowed by the sea during the legendary Cimbrian Flood in the second century B.C. The Frisian language was precious and had to be preserved. The Frisian language was a precious relic of prehistoric times and the political freedom of the Frisians could serve as an example to all Germans. That same year, Clement visited Holland, Friesland and Groningen, and his book - together with his German translation of Eeltje Halbertsma's Lapekoer - soon became known there; in July 1850 he was appointed an honorary member of the Selskip foar Fryske Tael en Skriftekennisse because of his publications. 15]
Clement referred to an old legend from Schleswig-Holstein, which claimed that large parts of the North Frisian coastal strip had been drowned in a storm surge. On that occasion, the English Channel would have come into being. Montanus de Haan
Hettema published about this in the Friesche Volks-Almanak of 1849.
The Cimbrian Flood also played a role in the work of Professor Johannes Matthias Schrant (1783-1866) in Leiden. In 1850, he published the book De Kimbren en hunne lotgevallen, in which he paints a penetrating picture of this flood, in which, according to him, large parts of the North Sea and Baltic coast drowned. 16] He was already familiar with the myth of the Cimbrian Flood: a comic piece he wrote in 1850 - he was fifteen at the time - starts with "the great Cimbrian flood that separated England from the mainland". 17]
He claims to have been inspired by the work of Van Haren. According to Jensma, the text can be considered the prototype for the Oera Linda book.
Translated with
www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
To compare the above idea about this flood, I found:
In the Celtic Iron Age, the Cimbri and Teutons marched on Italy and the Roman Empire
According to Greek and Roman historians, among other Clitarchus, Cimbri was in their home in Jylland exposed to the Cymbrian Flood, and this forced them to leave. Strabo, however, did not think that the flood was the real reason for the exodus; tides occur every day in these parts of the World, he argued.
However, it appears that there really occurred an unusual climatic event precisely at that time. By analyzing layers of turf in the bogs can be shown that while the lower, and thus older layer is dark, firm and hard and very chemically converted, there is - over a sudden and sharply defined boundary - a loose almost unkonverted mass of light brown peat, popularly called "dog meat". It consists almost entirely of peat, which must have plenty of moisture to grow. In other areas representing the same time, the bogs were covered with a layer of sand, gravel and clay ("Denmark: Introduction - Prehistory" - 1981 - Royal Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs).
It sounds a lot like a flood or other disaster with torrential rains that may have motivated large parts of the Iron Age people to take to the south.
Some researchers have pointed to the problems of a growing population and depleted soils as the actual triggering causes of the exodus. Others suggest cattle diseases.
From the
English Wiki: on Oera Linda book:
Contents
Themes running through the Oera Linda Book include catastrophism, nationalism, matriarchy, and mythology. The text alleges that Europe and other lands were, for a large part of their history, ruled by a succession of folk-mothers presiding over a hierarchical order of celibate priestesses dedicated to the goddess
Frya, daughter of the creator god Wr-alda and Jrtha, the earth mother. The claim is also made that this Frisian civilization possessed an alphabet that was the ancestor of the
Greek and
Phoenician alphabets. Modern
historiography is essentially ignored, particularly in the area of basic chronology of known events in the recent and distant past of Europe. Geological as well as geographical evidence that was readily available even as far back as Over de Linden's time is also mostly absent from the manuscript.
The earliest portion of the Oera Linda Book, namely
Frya's Tex, was supposedly composed in 2194 BC, whereas the most recent part, the letter of Hidde Oera Linda, dates to AD 1256. Almost half of the entire book comprises
The Book of Adela's Followers, the original text around which the rest grew. It is purported to have been compiled in the 6th century BC from a mixture of contemporary writings and ancient inscriptions. The last two sections of the Oera Linda Book contain a number of
lacunae and the book itself breaks off in mid-sentence.
It also describes a lost land called
Atland (the name given to Atlantis by the 17th century scholar
Olof Rudbeck), which was supposedly submerged in
2194 BC -- the same year as 19th century Dutch and Frisian almanacs, following traditional Biblical chronology, gave for Noah's flood.[12]
The timeframe is limited to a few thousand years, similar to what was common among the fundamentalists of the times.
In the book from
Gutenberg.org, or you could try
Sacred Texts, there is:
Five hundred and sixty-three years after the submersion of Atland—that is, 1600 years before Christ—a wise town priestess presided here, whose name was Min-erva—called by the sailors Nyhellenia. This name was well chosen, for her counsels were new and clear above all others.
However, the land in the North Sea disappeared before that, as did Atlantis. About
Doggerland, I found in the Wiki:
Doggerland (also called
Dogger Littoral[1]) was an area of land, now submerged beneath the southern
North Sea,
that connected Great Britain to continental Europe. It was flooded by rising sea levels around 6500-6200 BCE. Geological surveys have suggested that it stretched from what is now the east coast of Great Britain to what are now the
Netherlands, the western coast of
Germany and the peninsula of
Jutland.
[2] It was probably a rich habitat with human habitation in the
Mesolithic period,
[3] although rising sea levels gradually reduced it to low-lying islands before its final submergence, possibly following a
tsunami caused by the
Storegga Slide.
[4] Doggerland was named after the
Dogger Bank, which in turn was named after 17th-century Dutch fishing boats called
doggers.
[5]
The reports about cataclysm are too vague to be really helpful, it could be purely fictional, or a combination of combination of several events, or imagination influenced from another denisty, but how to tell? In the book from
Gutenberg.org there is about this collapse 2194 BC:
How the Bad Time Came.
During the whole summer the sun had been hid behind the clouds, as if unwilling to look upon the earth. There was perpetual calm, and the damp mist hung like a wet sail over the houses and the marshes. The air was heavy and oppressive, and in men’s hearts was neither joy nor cheerfulness. In the midst of this stillness the earth began to tremble as if she was dying. The mountains opened to vomit forth fire and flames. Some sank into the bosom of the earth, and in other places mountains rose out of the plain. Aldland, called by the seafaring people, Atland, disappeared, and the wild waves rose so high over hill and dale that everything was buried in the sea. Many people were swallowed up by the earth, and others who had escaped the fire perished in the water.
It was not only in Finda’s land that the earth vomited fire, but also in Twiskland (Germany). Whole forests were burned one after the other, and when the wind blew from that quarter our land was covered with ashes. Rivers changed their course, and at their mouths new islands were formed of sand and drift.
During three years this continued, but at length it ceased, and forests became visible. Many countries were submerged, and in other places land rose above the sea, and the wood was destroyed through the half of Twiskland (Germany).
Last time German had a volcanic activity was about 9,000-12,000 years ago.
Turning to the more "real"
History of the Netherlands, to get a breath of fresher air, even it it also has fictional elements in a deeper analysis, there was about the early Middle Ages 400-1100 CE:
As climatic conditions improved, there was another mass migration of
Germanic peoples into the area from the east. This is known as the "
Migration Period" (
Volksverhuizingen). The northern Netherlands received an influx of new migrants and settlers, mostly
Saxons, but also
Angles and
Jutes. Many of these migrants did not stay in the northern Netherlands but moved on to England and are known today as the
Anglo-Saxons. The newcomers who stayed in the northern Netherlands would eventually be referred to as "Frisians", although they were not descended from the ancient
Frisii. These new Frisians settled in the northern Netherlands and would become the ancestors of the modern
Frisians.
[43][44] (Because the early
Frisians and
Anglo-Saxons were formed from largely identical tribal confederacies, their respective languages were very similar.
Old Frisian is the most closely related language to
Old English[45] and the modern Frisian dialects are in turn the closest related languages to contemporary English.) By the end of the 6th century, the Frisian territory in the northern Netherlands had expanded west to the
North Sea coast and, by the 7th century, south to
Dorestad. During this period most of the northern Netherlands was known as
Frisia. This extended Frisian territory is sometimes referred to as
Frisia Magna (or
Greater Frisia).
Other Wikis I looked at were
Frisian Kingdom,
Friisi.,
Gaius Julius Civilis.
In my opinion, Oera Linda is a poor source for reliable history. There are some ideas here and there, but one would have to go beyond the book to find out more. I think the book persists because it has embedded fragments of
archetypes relating to ancestors, heroes (kings) and heroines (wise women) and maybe reflects ancient collective memories even if they are vague. I also wonder if the modern fascination is motivated by a possible future threat?
At the end of writing this post, I felt like having spent time dissecting a topic fit for another part of the forum like:
COINTELPRO and Disinformation or likely
New Age COINTELPRO The Dutch Wiki mentions the impact of the book on National Socialism, both old and new as well as the New Age Movement including attempts to revive pre-Christian practices. It is understandable.
