A Forgery, Not an Ancient Text

The Book of Veles was presented to the public in the twentieth century as a set of wooden boards inscribed with a record of pre-Christian Slavic religion, supposedly discovered before the Second World War and known afterward only through transcriptions and photographs, since the original boards were never produced for independent examination. Slavic philologists who have studied the text agree on the verdict, which is unusual in a field where so much about pre-Christian Slavic belief remains genuinely contested. The language of the Book of Veles matches no attested stage of any Slavic language; it reads instead as a modern mixture of forms drawn from several different Slavic languages at once, assembled with invented grammar that no historical dialect ever had, and the script does not correspond to any documented writing system used by early Slavic peoples. On the strength of that evidence the text is treated by specialists as a modern fabrication rather than a surviving ancient scripture, most plausibly composed in the middle of the twentieth century, and this is one of the comparatively few questions about Slavic paganism where scholarly opinion is settled rather than tentative and actively argued.