FORUM The Oera Linda Book Again John J Bimson I experienced a sense of /déja vu /on reading Derel Briarley's paper 'The Oera Linda Book' (/C&CR /1998:1, pp. 21-22). This enigmatic document (hereafter the /OLB/) was the subject of exchanges in the 'Letters' section of /SISW /twenty years ago [l], and I was one of the contributors. My fascination with the /OLB/ began in 1970 when I was fortunate enough to find a library copy /of The Oera Linda Book, /translated by WR Sandback (Trubner & Co., 1876). I was intrigued by the account of the sinking of Aldland (or Atland), dated to 2193BC and wondered whether this was part of the global catastrophes which Velikovsky suggested had occurred in the late 3rd millennium BC. However, after reading the whole book (which I did more than once), I reluctantly concluded that it was a 19th-century forgery. As not all current members will have access to the first issues of /SISW/, here is part of my Letter to the Editor which appeared in No. 4, 1979, in response to an enthusiastic item from DI Newman in the previous issue: 'Sadly, the rest of the contents, and the nature of the manuscript itself, both point to its being a forgery. In subsequent sections, we meet the legendary Minos as Minno, a Frisian sea-king who gives laws to the Cretans; Min-erva, a Frisian Burgtmaagd who rules the Greeks; Teunis and Inka, two Frisian naval captains, the former (sometimes called Neef-Teunis, hence Neptune) being active in the Mediterranean, the latter disappearing to found a colony overseas (we are left to guess where!). We meet Ulysses after the fall of Troy, and discover that he is a king of the Jonischen clans, i.e. a descendant of Jon, a Frisian; Calypso also appears - as another Frisian Burgtmaagd. Cecrops, the founder-King of Athens, turns out to have had a Frisian mother, and Buddha emerges from a Frisian colony in Kashmir - indeed, his name turns out to be Frisian. There seems no doubt that there is Frisiomania at work here, akin to the patriotism which led Olaf Rudbeck to place Atlantis, the Garden of Eden, and the cradle of civilisation in Sweden (in a three-volume work, 1675-78), and that which led a Flemish councillor, writing in 1806, to place the Elysian Fields in the Lower Rhine and to claim that the name Flushing preserved that of Ulysses. These works may well have provided inspiration for the Oera Linda concoction. But in the light of Velikovsky's theories, even more factors weigh against its authenticity, e.g. we have no hint at all of the Venus disasters at the time of Minerva and Cecrops, in spite of the narrative being fairly detailed at that point. The chronology of the book takes the sinking of Aldland as its starting-point, and the visit of Ulysses to Holland is dated precisely 1005 years after that event, i.e. in 1188BC; his visit is specifically said to have occurred after the fall of Troy. This fits well with the traditional date for the fall of Troy, but in Velikovsky's chronology the fall of Troy (and hence the wanderings of Ulysses, if we accept the latter as historical) belong in the 8th century BC. A supporter of the revised chronology must believe that the forger has betrayed his hand here. If the chronology of the Oera Linda Book is an artificial concoction, any apparent fit between the end of Aldland and Velikovsky's late 3rd millennium disasters must be fortuitous; or it may be that the date of 2193BC was chosen to suggest a link with the biblical Flood, which can be dated from certain internal biblical information to /c/. 2200BC (i.e. with only 215 years for the sojourn in Egypt, a view which was followed by Whiston and which was popular last century as well as today). Also against its authenticity is the fact that certain passages, e.g. that concerning the birth of Buddha, are almost word for words as found in Volney's /Ruins of Empires/ (/c/. 1800); see the criticisms in A. Hermann, /Unsere Ahnen und Atlantis/, Berlin 1934. We should also note that in 1875, when the manuscript was examined by an expert on paper manufacture, the paper was stated by him to be no more than 25 years old at that time, to have been made probably at a factory in Maastricht, and to have been given the appearance of age by being heated in a chimney (details in Hermann, /op. cit./) Whether the forger was Cornelis Over de Linden, Dr. Verwijs, or a certain F. Haverschmidt, as various authors have claimed, or whether it resulted from the collaboration of two or more of these people, is no longer relevant. Judged simply on its own contents, the book appears suspect in the extreme, and I would urge caution in any research connected with it.' In spite of subsequent defences of the /OLB/'s authenticity [2], my opinion has not changed. Incidentally, when Nel Kluitman replied to the above remarks in issue No. 6, she wrote: 'I propose to investigate just where the 'original' is and have it re-examined'. I do not recall reading news of the outcome but other members may be able to enlighten me. [/Editor's note/: sadly Nel Kluitman died in 1990, without writing further to SIS about the subject.] Notes and References 1. The first letter on the subject was from DI Newman, /SISW/ 1:3, Nov. 1978, pp. 18-19; I replied in /SISW/ 1:4, Feb. 1979, pp. 15-16 and there were further responses from DI Newman and Nel Kluitman in /SISW/ 2:1 (Issue No. 6), June 1979, pp. 8-11, Dr H de Vries (/SISW/ 3:4), DI Newman and Peter Hughes (/SISW/ 4:2) and and Lord Walsingham (/SISW /5:1). According to Dr de Vries, who gave references to Dutch literature on the subject, 'As far as I know the last scientific investigation into the authenticity of the O.L.B. has been made by Mr E. Miedema and by a team headed by Prof. W.G. Hellinga of Amsterdam University at the close of the fifties. The results of this codicological and linguistic research is that the chronicle undoubtedly is a hoax'. 2. Notably a series of ingenious articles by PM Hughes in /The New Atlantean. /Mr Hughes, who publishes this journal privately, was kind enough to send me complimentary copies for several years. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Derel Briarley responds John Bimson cites the 1934 work by Hermann to the effect that in 1875 an expert on paper manufacture judged the paper to be no more than 25 years old. In that same year the ink was examined and found to contain to iron, which we are told dates it before 1300 (/Saturday Review/ July 1, 1876; one wonders why the under-25 year old paper was not mentioned here?). His statement that accepting Velikovsky's chronology re. Troy requires one to 'believe that the forger has betrayed his hand' in this regard need not follow. The traditional date of the fall of Troy, /c/. 1200BC, had been accepted since Eratosthenes; over the centuries a mass of Greek legends could easily have passed into Germanicc lore and been adapted for local consumption. Concerning Buddha, I have not read Volney's /Ruins of Empires /but in the /OLB/ Buddha is also called Krisen (Krishna) and Jesos. There was plenty of time for the Buddha and Krishna tales to reach Friesland via the nomads of the steppes and northern Europe. In the OLB Buddha story the Millennium was predicted to come 4,000 years after the sinking of Atland - 1807 - and if the book was produced decades afterwards, one can only wonder why the Millennium prediction was included. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Oera Linda postscript from Eric Cooley I was intrigued by Derel Brierley's article, especially with regard to a supposed northern location of Atland (Atlantis?). Brierley relates that the /Oera Linda/ /Book /places Atland as 'stretching out far to the west of Jutland'. Robert Scrutton's /The Other Atlantis/ shows it as 'a huge island off Norway's coast', and John Grant's /A Directory of Discarded Ideas/ places it, erroneously according to Brierley, 'between the north of Britain and Greenland'. Zeno's 'Map of the North', in Hapgood's /Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings/, shows an island, Frisland, in a similar position north west of Scotland. May I bring to the attention of SIS members a little known book, Comyns Beaumont's /The Riddle of Prehistoric Britain/ (published by Rider & Co, 1946)? The thrust of this volume, which merits a close study, is that 'it envisages an entirely new outlook on the past history of the world in which the British Isles emerge as the predominant influence'. Beaumont believed that 'the Atlantic and not the Mediterranean was the focus of world civilization' and that 'the British Isles, with the Scandinavian Peninsula - originally itself an island - emerged from obscurity as the true motherland of the Aryan or Nordic race, the biblical Adamites, and dominated the ancient world long before the Flood of Noah'. Beaumont believed the focus to be the Atlantis of legend. 'The day arrived when this civilization collapsed .... It was what we call the Flood of Noah .... This prodigious event was by no means local and inundation was only one of its tremendous legacies to future generations. It approached earth from the celestial north-east and flung itself upon an unhappy world ... Its epicentre lay in Scandinavia and the British Isles, commemorated since by many an epic and legend placed geographically altogether wrongly by historians and theologians, ... It obliterated many landmarks and elevated others. It permanently affected the world's climate towards greater extremes of cold and damp, lengthened the solar year by enlarging the world's orbit ... It was the drowning of Atlantis.' 'The Flood immortalizes the collision of a fallen planet, later termed Satan, actually a cometary body, with our Earth.' Much of Beaumont's book is an attempt to identify ancient writings with physical features of the British Isles, especially the north west of Scotland. Largely forgotten, is it about time that we took another objective look at Beaumont's ideas?