The Dvůr Králové and Zelená Hora manuscripts, also called the Queen's Court manuscript and Green mountain manuscript, respectively, are literary hoaxes purporting to be epic Slavic manuscripts written in Old Czech. They first appeared in the early nineteenth century. There were early suspicions about their authenticity, but they were not decisively established to be forgeries until 1886 in a series of articles in Tomáš Masaryk's magazine.
The two manuscripts
Queen's Court manuscript
claimed that he discovered the Dvůr Králové manuscript, also called the "Queen's Court manuscript", in 1817 in the Church of Saint John the Baptist at Dvůr Králové nad Labem in Bohemia. The original Old Czech text was published by Hanka in 1818, and a German version appeared the next year.
Green mountain manuscript
The second manuscript, which came to be known as the Zelená Hora manuscript or "Green mountain manuscript" was 1819, named after the Zelená Hora Castle in which it was purportedly discovered. It had been mailed anonymously in 1818 to Franz, Count Kolowrat-Liebsteinsky at the Bohemian Museum. The Count was Lord High Castellan of Prague and backer of the newly founded museum. It was later revealed that the sender was Josef Kovář who served as to Hieronymus Karl Graf von Colloredo-Mansfeld, the owner of the Zelená Hora Castle. Kovář allegedly discovered the manuscript at his master's castle in Nepomuk in 1817. It was not until 1858 that Kovář's role in publicizing this manuscript was publicly revealed by. Although Kovář had died in 1834, Tomek, through interviewing Father, was able to confirm that Kovář was the one who had originally sent the manuscript. Following Tomek's revelation, the work, which had sometimes been referred to as the Libušin soud manuscript, after the poem it contained, came to be consistenly called Rukopis zelenohorský or "Green mountain manuscript".
Contents
Rukopis královédvorský contained 14 poems: 6 epics, 2 lyric epics, and 8 love songs. Záboj and Slavoj, two invented warrior-poets, feature in the epics. The Rukopis zelenohorský contained two poems, the "Sněmy" and "Libušin soud". A multilingual edition of the Rukopis Kralodvorský appeared in 1843; this edition included John Bowring's English translation. Later, "Lubuša's Verdict" and some of the poetry from the Queen's Court manuscript were translated into English by Albert Henry Wratislaw and published in 1852.
Response
When the first manuscript appeared, it was touted as a major discovery. But when the second manuscript appeared, it was pronounced a forgery by Josef Dobrovský. Jernej Kopitar seconded this opinion, accusing Hanka of being the author of the hoax. Many of the important Czech writers at the time, however, supported the manuscripts' authenticity including dictionary compiler and author of a Czech literary historyJosef Jungmann, writer František Čelakovský, historian František Palacký, and poet-folklorist Karel Jaromír Erben. In England, John Bowring, who was a translator of Slavonic poetry, had dealings with authorities on both sides of the debate. When he first sought suitable Czech material, he approached Kopitar, who recommended Dobrovský as someone who could provide an appropriate list of texts. Later, Čelakovský learned of this enterprise, and not only furnished his own list, but became Bowring's close collaborator, sending him material with his own German paraphrases for Bowring to work on. Bowring, partly to make amends for the delayed publication of the Czech poetry anthology, wrote a piece in the Foreign Quarterly Review in 1828, which presented the debate about these manuscripts evenly for both sides. Wratislaw noted in his 1852 translation that he was well aware of the controversy when he published his translation, but determined that the skeptics had not made their case. Alois Vojtěch Šembera wrote a book in 1879 which contended that the "Libušin soud" poem was a forgery and named as its creator. The authenticity of both manuscripts was not rejected conclusively until the 1880s when several independently-written articles appeared that assaulted their veracity. One author who doubted the authenticity of the manuscripts, Tomáš Masaryk, used his journal to publish a body of literature to support that view. The linguist Jan Gebauer wrote an article debunking the manuscripts in the February 1886 issue of Athenaeum, and Masaryk in a later issue wrote that the poems could be proven as "reworked from Modern Czech to Old Czech", presenting metrical and grammatical evidence to support his claim. In the interim, the manuscripts were generally regarded romantically as evidence of early Czech literary achievement, demonstrating that such epic and lyric poetry predated even the Nibelungenlied. They were also interpreted as evidence that early Czech society had embraced democratic principles. Pan-Slavic nationalists saw in the manuscripts a symbol of national conscience. Therefore, when Palacký wrote his Czech history based partly on these manuscripts, he depicted a romanticized Slavic struggle against the German non-democratic social order. Palacký's historical accounts of Bohemia based on the manuscripts also bolstered the Czechs' exclusive claims on Bohemia. The debate over the authenticity and authorship of these manuscripts has occupied Czech politics for more than a century, and voices claiming the poems to be genuine were not silenced even into World War II. Václav Hanka, the discoverer of the first manuscript, and his friend and roommate are generally regarded to have been the forgers of the poetry, but they never confessed to writing them, and there has not been any irrefutable proof that they were the authors.
