I’ve looked at the Rohonc Codex numerous times in the past, though my conclusions so far haven’t exactly amounted to what I’d consider headline news:-
* its drawings are plainly Judeo-Christian, though often viewed through a distorting lens;
* the presence in its text of both pictograms and ridiculously repetitive sequences points to some kind of hacky nomenclator cipher;
* frankly, it’s a bit of a mess, with many folios stitched together out of order.
Being brutally honest, I’ve been waiting for Benedek Lang’s book on it to get translated into English (and I’d be delighted to publish such a splendid thing myself) before throwing myself off the Rohonc Codex’s cliff-top with only my cipher mystery experience to bungee back to the top. For if you were planning on exploring a bear cave, wouldn’t you want a torch to help steer you past previous adventurers’ rotting bones, hmmm?
All the same, I was recently delighted to find a genuinely sane Rohonc Codex website courtesy of Delia Huegel from Arad in Western Romania. She has – much to her own surprise, it would seem – spent several years trying to find and understand the religious dimension of the Rohonc Codex’s drawings. I’ve gone through (and enjoyed) every webpage: she writes with wit and verve, and – unlike much of the Rohoncology out there – she is happy to fess up to the issues her approach faces. It’s a tricky old thing, fer sher, and such honesty helps a great deal.
For me, the two highlights of her site were (a) her comparison of Albrecht Dürer’s hellmouth with the Rohonc Codex’s hellmouth, which I agree is a solid indication that North-Western European religious iconography was a specific influence on the Rohonc Codex’s author: and (b) her identification of King David praying to God and the back-to-front rendering of YHWH in Hebrew. Both are pretty much historical slam-dunks, but both raise more questions than they set out answer. Which is what the best answers nearly always do, IMO.
But most magnificently of all, her site is brought to life by the direct inclusion of a significant amount of imagery she has collected along the way while developing her ideas: I can imagine that the site sits very much as a kind of visual / iconic complement to Lang’s more obviously textual approach. Recommended! 🙂
As an afterthought, a question struck me: what if the pages were written in a back-to-front order, but a later owner then tried to rebind them so that the drawings instead appeared in a more conventional-looking front-to-back order? Just a thought!
Hey! Also what if it was originally a scroll (Torah). I’ve never visited a synagogue, so I’m not familiar with which spindle would begin the reading. Another interesting aspect: would the lines of script wrap from right-to-left, then-left-to right? Also, could such a word as ‘choron’ exist?
May I be able to request Ms Huegel’s book from my local library? Fingers X’d. Thanx!
bdid1dr: she doesn’t have a book, just a long set of web-pages all about the Rohonc Codex (and everything around it). Lots of interesting stuff there, I’m sure you’ll enjoy it. 🙂
After I posted my query, I re-read your dialogue and references. I will be linking and reading the offerings that you and Delia have posted. Thanx again for your patience!
bd
Hi Nick,
and thank you for the article (especially for the ”genuinely sane” part 🙂 I mean it). What a nice surprise. You made my day.
Delia: no, thank *you* for putting so much time and effort into your research, and for documenting it so nicely on the web. (I think Benedek Lang’s book is definitely something you ought to have a look at.)
Thank you Delia and Nick. Your efforts are much appreciated.
Bonjour Nick !
C’est très intéressant.
Avez-vous la traduction de Viorica Enăchiuc ?
Ruby
Dear all I suspect I am expatiating on the very obvious but the Rohanc codex looks loaded from start to finish with Tironian notation! In fact it may be mainly T.N. Recall that some Scottish histories were so loaded with Tironian notation (est 14K exist) that no one has ever figured them out. Researchers (particularly Nick) likely have been here and make the same supposition but there you have it again, if that is the case. If read from R->L then those reverse “7”s can be seen as superscripts indicating a “t” is missing; the “z”s are “n’s” etc as can be seen from charts in places like the Wiki. Cheers, Tom.
Hi, everybody,
It is such a good feeling to see that my work is appreciated.
I have Benedek Lang’s book, on a shelf, among the Bibles, heresy, history and other kind of books related to the Codex I gathered in the meantime. Honestly, I didn’t look in it before I completed writing down my findings because I tried to develop my ideas on my own. I promised myself to confront them with his book after I’m done, but I am not very confident in my Hungarian. I expect it to be rather technical and this would be a stretch to my knowledge both in language and in cryptology. (I am a biologist, the most I know about codes is the DNA code.) But it is a definit must. I read, rather early in my work, your interview with mr. Lang (there is a link in my blog to it) and other materials related to the Codex I was able to find on the WWW, afterwards I focused on the imagery and on the incidental script elements that could be identified from the drawings. I tink in a “normal” script the number of elements I identified would be enough for a good start. But what’s the fun in “normal”?
As concerns the Tironian notes, yes, I looked a bit into them. That’s the most I can say.
My blog was printed, but only in two copies. One is with my parents, the other is neatly tucked in my bookcase, resting near Benedek Lang’s book 🙂
Best regards,
Delia
Hi Delia,
Though my own Hungarian is not too far from your Czech (beer & ice cream, if I remember correctly?), Benedek’s Rohonc book gives me the strong impression of being urbane, literary, stylish, and metaphor-heavy – i.e. wonderfully playful and conceptual if you’re a native Hungarian speaker, but probably close to impossible to translate if you’re not. Of course, I might be wrong… but I suspect in this instance I’m not. 🙁
All the same, I’d trust him more than just about anyone else out there (present company excepted)… though I still doubt I’d be able to bring myself to have his faith that the two men have decrypted the Codex’s text as an artificial language. Doesn’t ring true to me! 😐
Cheers, Nick
Nick and Delia: Dare I mention Ellie Velinska’s blog herein? She apparently is fluent in several languages besides her native Czech.
beedee I’d 1-der
Hi Delia,
there is a recent article in Cryptologia journal about the solution.
See doi: 10.1080_01611194.2018.1449147
br
Attila