Quire 20 folio ordering…

Elmar Vogt’s blog has just thrown one of his interesting Voynich Thoughts into the air (or should I say “the aiiir”?).

Having patiently tabulated all the paragraph stars in Q20 back in 2006 (it’s a kind of Voynich researcher rite of passage, I did much the same thing in 2002), and classified them into “hollow” [-], “dotted” [o] and “massive” [x], Elmar now notes a repetitive pattern: that most star sequences simply alternate between hollow and dotted, i.e. o-o-o-o-o-o-o-.

Yet because the stars on f103r (which was very probably the original first page of the quire) are heavily embellished, he tentatively concludes that “the writer/painter started off somewhat artistically ambitious, but […] got bored and decided to simply take turns between hollow and dotted stars.”

Elmar then points out that “the only pages significantly deviating from this pattern are f103r, f104r and f108r“, and (the logical chap he is) suggests that this might have been caused by the bifolios within the quire being scrambled before the folio numbers were added, i.e. that f103 and f104 (currently the first two folios of the quire) could well have originally been immediately followed by f108 (currently the sixth folio of the quire). All very sensible – but this, just as with every other page ordering hack that’s been proposed over the years, would need additional corroboration from physical evidence, such as handwriting continuity, ink continuity, quill bluntness continuity, coding system continuity, contact transfers, vellum cuts and folds, vellum thickness mapping, etc.

In some ways, this gives me a bit of a weird feeling: I spent years working basically alone on precisely this kind of marginal codicology, but now Glen Claston and Elmar Vogt are both on pretty much the same case. Circa 2005, my point of departure was that the folio numbers and the quire numbers were just plain wrong, and that it simply has to be easier to try to decipher the VMs in its original page order than in its present “anagrammed” (or rather “folio-shuffled”) state.

Even so, we’re attempting to reconstruct the original page-order with our eyes nearly shut: we still need someone to take a huge lateral step sideways to amass a sufficient amount of physical evidence to make any significant progress – but unfortunately the painstaking process of debating one marginal blob at a time is all we currently have open to us. Oh well!