Manuscripts of Dvůr Králové and Zelená Hora

[4][5][6] It was later revealed that the sender was Josef Kovář who served as administrator of the manorial income to Hieronymus Karl Graf von Colloredo-Mansfeld,[6] the owner of Zelená Hora Castle.

[16] 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.

[18] Alois Vojtěch Šembera wrote a book in 1879 which contended that the "Libušin soud" poem (the second manuscript) was a forgery and named Josef Linda [cz] as its creator.

[22][23] 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.

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.

[citation needed] 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.

[15] Václav Hanka, the discoverer of the first manuscript, and his friend and roommate Josef Linda 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.