Category Archives: Rohonc Codex

I’ve recently had some nice correspondence with Rafał Miazga, an independent Polish researcher who, having deftly avoided getting trapped by the perils of Voynich Manuscript research, instead travelled deep down the Rohonc Codex rabbit-hole. He has posted up a (substantial) paper on academia.edu outlining both his research and his interesting (yet tentative) conclusions, which I think are well worth reading. I also thought it would be worth using this post to summarise my very high-level view of the state of play of Rohonc Codex research, plus why I think Rafał’s paper is particularly interesting.

Kiraly and Tokai

After many years of only stumbling advances, Rohonc Codex research is now broadly dominated by the work of two researchers, Lev Kiraly and Gábor Tokai. Even though Kiraly and Tokai haven’t fully published their research, there seems little doubt (even from Benedek Lang) that they are heading in the right direction with the meaning they are extracting from sets of Rohonc Codex words.

And yet their results remain highly bemusing, incomplete, and unsatisfactory. For them, Rohonc Codex words have no obvious declination or conjugation (so are more like English than Latin), and largely lack structure (many passages are more like repetitive babble than structured text).

Overall, I think it’s fair to say that K & T are trying to solve the puzzle of the Rohonc Codex from the details upwards, i.e. as a pure linguistic / syntax / grammar puzzle. But right from the start, it seems to me that they’ve been tangled in ‘word weeds’: like the Voynich Manuscript, the Rohonc Codex presents many repetitive babble-like features (though admittedly not quite at the same level), and K & T seem to be perpetually stalled by these.

Ultimately, they need the Rohonc Codex’s text to be a pure language for their methodology to work, but looking in from the outside I find it hard not to conclude that the two don’t quite fit as well as they’d like. I’ve thought from pretty much Day One that they’re missing some kind of higher-level hypothesis: they know how it works, but they can’t quite say what it is. For them, the Rohonc Codex remains an isolate, i.e. “an individual socially withdrawn or removed from society” (Merriam-Webster), and so they struggle to draw parallels or connections with other languages, other historical artefacts, or other histories.

Enter Rafał Miazga

What Rafał Miazga did is compile his own transcription, and then draw his own low-level conclusions which were largely parallel to Kiraly and Tokai (though there are many overlaps, they’re far from identical). What they do seem to me to broadly share is that the Rohonc Codex is both a religious mess (i.e. one that doesn’t quite match ‘proper’ Bible stories) and a linguistic mess. On balance, I think it’s fair to say that Rafał’s word-level account of the Rohonc Codex isn’t at all far from what Kiraly and Tokai put forward.

But here’s the big difference: Rafał also has an idea of what he strongly suspects the Rohonc Codex is – which is (probably summarising too boldly and quickly) a book written down by a profoundly deaf monk in an idiosyncratic language. That is, the Rohonc Codex is (in some way) a sign-language transcription, with a large code-book (nomenclatura) of specific signs.

This is a very bold idea, and one that I think Rafał should be commended for, as well as encouraged to explore further. Well done Rafał, keep going!

Nick’s thoughts

In some ways, what Rafał has achieved could well be a kind of Rohonc Codex “plot point” (i.e. that pivots the narrative and spins the story off into a new direction), in that it suggests other histories to look at.

For example, monks who had taken a vow of silence (Trappist, but also Cistercian and Benedictine) had their own monastic sign languages. There are plenty of websites where these are mentioned or discussed: I believe that there is a decent (if dispersed) literature on these. There are even YouTube videos where monastic sign languages are mentioned:

The primary historical question for me is therefore whether there are any other examples of transcribed monastic sign languages mentioned in the literature. I’ve suggested this to Rafał and I’m sure he will be looking for these. There are certainly partial word-lists out there, but might there be other texts?

More generally, I suggested to Rafał that he might think about looking at the Protestant Reformation in Hungary. This was a hugely complicated time for Christianity, where Catholicism, Protestantism and Unitarianism were all prominent players, with many Diets trying to broker accommodations (both religious and political) between them. This tangled picture seems to me to be mirrored by the Rohonc Codex’s own tangled religious tropes: so perhaps its author was a profoundly deaf monk whose religious rug had been pulled from under him by the Protestant Reformation?

In many ways, what a hypothesis like Rafał’s offers isn’t necessarily complete answers, but rather a way of looking at historical sources with new eyes. With luck, this might prove to be the start of a fresh chapter for the Rohonc Codex. Fingers crossed!

A copy of Benedek Lang’s nice-looking book “The Rohonc Codex: Tracing a Historical Riddle” landed on my doormat this week, courtesy of The Penn State University Press (its publisher). Its back cover blurb promises that it “surveys the fascinating theories associated with the Codex“, and that it finishes up by “pointing to a possible solution to the enigma“.

Though I was already a fan of Benedek (his (2008) “Unlocked Books” sits on the bookshelf just behind me), it was clear within a few pages of this new book that his (formerly densely academic) writing style has opened out in the intervening decade and a half. So anyone with an interest in the mysterious Rohonc Codex’s strange writing and pointy-chinned Biblical chappies will quickly find themselves drawn in to his accessible and readable account.

Benedek also partially presents the book as a sort of ‘survivor’s account’ of the wave of obsession with the Rohonc Codex that washed over him for a few years (which he was also fortunate enough to get grants to pursue). Perhaps this is an inevitable consequence of diving deep into this kind of subject matter, a kind of cipher-y Locard’s Exchange Principle where a little bit of the object’s madness brushes off onto you, however hard you try to stay aloof from it.

Regardless, the book builds up and up in a long slow crescendo towards discussing Gabor Tokai and Levente Kiraly’s (claimed) solution of the Rohonc Codex, all the way to page 130 (where Lang mentions my 2018 blog post that remained somewhat skeptical about T&K’s 2018 Cryptologia article), where… the whole thing basically stops dead.

It should be no surprise that I found this unbelievably frustrating. In football terms, he played a perfect passing sequence to get in front of an open goal, but then chose to stand on the ball. I felt like a Brazilian commentator screaming at Lang to just knock it in, KNOCK IT IN: but instead he just stood there… and then the final whistle blew.

Whereas previously I described Tokai and Kiraly’s 2018 article as a game of two halves (i.e. their codicology and block analysis was exemplary, but everything they tried to build on top of that felt a bit like a house of cards), Lang’s book feels more like just a first half. He comes across as almost in awe of Tokai and Kiraly’s work (e.g. he mentions on p.125 that Tokai has all but memorized the Rohonc Codex’s 450 pages, memorized it, I tells ya); and yet seems oddly unable to explain in print exactly what it is about their work he is so convinced by.

For me, one really epic diagram (fig. 23, p.126) taken from Kiraly’s (2011/2012) paper in Theologiai Szemle 54 exemplifies both the best and the most frustrating aspects of Lang’s book. This is because it highlights the textual wrapper that Kiraly used to infer the presence of a number system; yet also demonstrates the shortcomings of that same inferred number system but in a tiny font that is just about at the print’s limit of readability.

Essentially, that was the point that I desperately hoped Benedek would unpack the Rohonc’s claimed number system (in many ways this is a key technical aspect of Tokai and Kiraly’s work, because numbers are often an exploitable weakness of cipher systems), to make it all more tangible and understandable to his own readers (including me).

However, I can’t shift the nagging suspicion that Lang shares many of the same reservations that I had back in 2018 (e.g. his discussion of problems with the text on p.129 is very much in the same vein), but that he didn’t want to rock the boat by being negative about such outstanding guys as Tokai and Kiraly. All the same, bracketing contentious issues doesn’t actually make them go away, and if anything doing so in a book does one’s readers a disservice.

As far as it goes, then, this is a great little book on the Rohonc Codex which I’m happy to recommend for every cipher bookshelf: but quite why Lang didn’t tap the ball over the goal line still remains a mystery to me.

Hot off the Cryptologia presses comes news of Levente Zoltán Király & Gábor Tokai’s (2018) paper “Cracking the code of the Rohonc Codex” (Cryptologia, 42:4, 285-315, DOI: 10.1080/01611194.2018.1449147). This is part of a long series of papers and articles the two authors have been putting out that try to explain different technical aspects of the Rohonc Codex decryption they have been developing (though they initially started independently), and which Hungarian uber-crypto-guy Benedek Láng has favourably mentioned a number of times.

I now have a copy of the paper (which Lev Király kindly passed me) and have spent the last few days combing over it. Even though what they have done is thoroughly fascinating, I have to say that what emerges for me overall is a very mixed picture. I’ll try to explain…

Rohonc Codex codicology

Though at least half of the account of the history of research into the Rohonc Codex they present (pp.286-288) somewhat immodestly discusses their own findings and conclusions, Király and Tokai have clearly put a lot of effort into trying to understand the physical object itself (pp.288-293). Though a few of their codicological inferences are based on their interpretations of the pictures and text (and a number of their decryptions are inserted directly into the text as fact), most are based on exactly the kind of careful observation and physical insight you would hope to see.

Codicologically, what emerges more or less exactly mirrors what we see in the Voynich Manuscript:
* bifolios missing, swapped, and moved around arbitrarily, coupled with other sections that seem to have stayed intact.
* misleading foliation that was added long after bifolios had been shuffled
* misleading marginalia and notes added by owners who did not know what the text said
* some places where the picture was drawn first, others where the text was written first
* rebuttals of unjustified claims that there are no corrections
* rebuttals of unjustified claims that it must surely be a hoax
* and so forth.

As a result, I think that Király and Tokai’s codicological analyses imply that the Rohonc Codex has almost all the same physical and historical structures that the Voynich Manuscript has (niceties relating to textual analysis aside).

Cracking the Rohonc Codex’s numbers?

Király & Tokai point (pp.296-297) approvingly to Ottó Gyürk’s (1970) paper “Megfejthető-e a Rohonci-kódex?” [Can the Rohonc Codex Be Solved?]. Élet és Tudomány 25:1923–28, and extend the set of (what looks like) number instances that Gyürk found:

The underlying number pattern they infer from this sequence is as follows:

While their proposal that this is a number system that works like Roman numerals but where the ‘6’ has a shape instead of the ‘5’ (“V”) is possible, I have to say that to me it seems unbelievably unlikely (e.g. there’s nothing remotely like it in Flegg’s “Numbers Through the Ages”). It also seems likely to me that the text we see includes copying errors, and it may well therefore be that the specific sequence they highlight should have begun “III”, “IIII” (or probably the more idiosyncratically medieval “iij”, “iiij”) rather than “IIII”, “IIIII” as written. Instead postulating a 1-6-10 numbering system to explain this away seems too implausible to me.

What seems far more likely is that this is a kind of very slightly bastardized Roman numerals where you can write 5 both as “IIIII” and as “V”, in the same way that you can validly write 4 (additively) as “IIII” and (subtractively) as “IV”. Hence I’m currently far from convinced, based on what they have presented so far, that they have managed to nail down this basic part of the number system as well as they think they have.

They then proceed to construct an even more arcane number system which they assert encodes dates as if they were in Arabic numerals, but where the thousands digit and hundreds digit are reversed (i.e. what is written as “5160” actually means “1560”, where 1560 is a magic number “which is dated by old Christian tradition to the year 33 CE”):

When Gábor Tokai [discovered] the number 5166 next to the drawing of the three kings (21r) and 5199 (058r09 − 10) in the vicinity of drawings of the resurrection of Christ (56v, 59r), he affirmed that the numbers denote years.

OK, I can see how the logic arguing for this is so going to be so complex that it would need to be written up in a separate paper. But I can also see how I don’t believe what they have presented here at all: so I’m going to say that I’m sorry, but even though a good part of the underlying codicology and analysis is very likely highlighting some good stuff that needs working with and developing, I don’t believe the reconstructed number system claimed here is yet correct. 🙁

Cracking the Rohonc Codex’s code?

The paper tries to explain (p.293) what the authors have found (i.e. that ‘Rohoncese’ is a code, though one so complex that’s clearly not easy for them to explain why or how, which is why it is going to take several papers and several years of their effort) and what they are aspiring towards with their decryption efforts:

The principles of our criteria and method of codebreaking may seem banal to the reader, but we must emphasize them because of the bad reputation gained by the amateur researchers of the codex. Furthermore, as many examples in our next paper on the “wobbliness” of the code will show, the writing system is far from being simple and clean. We must affirm that these results are not due to methodically deficient research but to the writing itself, which was analyzed with painstaking care and strictness.

We demand that one symbol signify one thing, and whenever there is any digression from this principle — either by more symbols signifying one thing or one symbol signifying more things — it must be sufficiently supported by argument. Our case is difficult because the codex has codes signifying words of a language, and words behave less regularly than letters. In every natural language the presence of homonyms and synonyms creates ambiguity. Yet we demand that even this amount of ambivalence in our proposed solution be supported by evidence.

OK. So how does Király and Tokai’s actual decryption measure up to the lofty ideals they set for themselves here? Well… after a long series of caveats, concessions and defensive clauses, the whole section concludes (p.295):

Thus the plausibility of our proposed solution is difficult to specify. The core of our reading has such strong inner and outer evidence that we may affirm that it stands beyond doubt. The rest is of various degrees of certainty, which is indicated wherever necessary.

Their text then includes long readings of sections taken from the Rohonc Codex where tiny groups of letters are read as individual codes, which are in turn interpreted as individual words, all supporting each other. As a single line example, here’s the first part of the section that they believe is the Lord’s Prayer (p.303):

At the same time, the decryption never goes below the level of individual words. Are these pronounceable? What language are they derived from? How does this fit into the tree of European languages? These are all parceled off to be answered in future papers.

Probably the Best Part of the Paper

For me, the most persuasive-looking of all the authors’ codebreaking details relates to the Parable of the Talents:

Here’s the same section in the Rohonc Codex (bearing in mind that the real text runs from right to left, whereas the transcription they present runs left to right), where I have highlighted the first line blue, the second line red, and the third line purple:

Despite having an O-Level in Religious Studies, I’d be the first to admit that my knowledge of the Bible is patchy. But even I knew that the above wasn’t quite how it was told in Matthew 25:14-30. Rather, the three servants got 5, 2, and 1 talents respectively, which is why they write up the “3” (actually 2) talents as [sic] on p.300:

14 For it will be like a man going on a journey, who called his servants and entrusted to them his property.
15 To one he gave five talents, to another two, to another one, to each according to his ability. Then he went away.
16 He who had received the five talents went at once and traded with them, and he made five talents more.
17 So also he who had the two talents made two talents more.
18 But he who had received the one talent went and dug in the ground and hid his master’s money.

Or, if you prefer, here’s the same section in the Latin Vulgate:

14 sicut enim homo proficiscens vocavit servos suos et tradidit illis bona sua
15 et uni dedit quinque talenta alii autem duo alii vero unum unicuique secundum propriam virtutem et profectus est statim
16 abiit autem qui quinque talenta acceperat et operatus est in eis et lucratus est alia quinque
17 similiter qui duo acceperat lucratus est alia duo
18 qui autem unum acceperat abiens fodit in terra et abscondit pecuniam domini sui

So: if their claimed block equivalence to the first half of Matthew 25:15 is indeed correct (and there are arguments both for and against this), perhaps the right question to be asking is whether there is there some odd Mitteleuropa tradition whereby the number of talents in this parable is not 5/2/1 but 1/3/5?

So, What Does Nick Think About All This?

In the best footballing tradition, Király and Tokai’s paper is (as the above should have made abundantly clear) a game of two very different halves.

By which I mean:
* the first 45 minutes stand as testament to the authors’ codicological hard work, almost all of which I’m convinced will stand as really strong, freestanding research (but which would have been further strengthened by unpicking various assertions that derive from their decryption). I would further include here the grounds from which they inferred the existence of a numbering system (though not the actual numbering system they describe itself)
* the second 45 minutes revolve around an attempt at a decryption that occasionally seems to work at a word level, but without ever getting to the bottom of what is actually going on (i.e. in terms of letters / grammar / structure etc).

The authors approvingly summarize (p.287) Benedek Láng’s view of the Rohonc Codex:

Láng’s greatest achievement was his attempt to identify the type of the cipher or code. He saw three options as equally possible: a monoalphabetic cipher with homophones, nullities, and nomenclators; stenography; or an artificial (“perfect”) language.

And yet, just as with the Voynich Manuscript, reducing the question of a writing system to precisely three mutually exclusive pigeonholes is an intellectually barren starting point, one which the astute Láng himself would surely be uncomfortable with. There are many more overlapping possibilities to consider, such as abbreviating shorthand (i.e. where words are contracted or truncated), alphabets based on pronunciation, and so forth.

Personally, I would be entirely unsurprised if the codicological analysis Király and Tokai carried out that led to their finding even half a line of a block equivalent (i.e. the the first half of Matthew 25:15) will turn out to be the first glimmer of a Rohonc “Rosetta Stone”: and for that all credit should be due to them. However, I don’t yet believe that the rest of their analysis has born the tasty fruit they think it has: and so there will likely be many more twists and turns for them to go through in their quest to decrypt the “Hungarian Voynich”.

Until such time as the sun burns out and/or the Kardashians are no longer celebrities, the Internet will continue to be littered by clickbait gosh-wow pages claiming to list the top [insert number here] cipher mysteries. And of the unsolved ciphers these typically include, probably the least known is the Rohonc Codex.

And so I decided a few days ago to go looking for a definitive book on the Rohonc Codex. After all the years the Rohonc Codex has spent under the world wide web’s spotlight, one such book must surely have come out by now, right?

Well… wrong, actually. But regardless, I thought I ought to flag two of the books I did find, purely as some kind of blogtastic public service…

The second worst Rohonc Codex book ever

In this digital printing age, it turns out that there are a number of groups of people who rip articles out of Wikipedia (often by the hundred or even thousand) and market them as ebooks and/or POD (“print on demand” books). In the case of BetaScript Publishing, their Rohonc Codex book is entitled (unsurprisingly) “Rohonc Codex”; is 120 pages long (though my guess is that most of those are generic filler); is one of some 5000+ titles churned out by the company; and is priced at a splutter-worthy 28.99 euros.

In the absence of any clear scenario where parasitic non-books like this are genuinely a good idea for someone somewhere (and not just a scam), all I can do is advise you that rubbish this bad really does exist, in the hope that you don’t buy it.

Besides, if you do have money burning a hole in your pocket that you’re desperate almost beyond measure to spend on something utterly pointless and yet marginally Rohonc Codex-related, there is another book out there that arguably offers less value than this…

The worst Rohonc Codex book ever

As you doubtless know, digital publishing platforms have allowed a vast number of completely baseless and zero-merit theories about cipher mysteries to emerge into the sunlight of Amazon.com’s virtual repository. All the same, I must confess that even I wasn’t quite ready for the 156-page “Rohonc Codex: English Translation Paperback” (2011), courtesy of Linnaeus Hoffmann Publishing and “Mr Dicky Maloney (Author),‎ Mr Kenneth Grahame (Author),‎ Mr Bernie Douglas (Introduction)”. Yes, the very same “Mr Kenneth Grahame” who died in 1932.

For it turns out that:

The Rohonc Codex is a Twelfth Century Hungarian text, written in a language, that until this very day, has not been translated by anyone else. Not a single word. And then Dicky Maloney painstakingly translated this text, word for word. As it turns out, by pure coincidence, it is Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, word for word.

And here’s the cover, which is in the same general vein:

Now OK, it’s obviously just a joke: and Linnaeus Hoffman Publishing’s other book (also from 2011) was “The Stickwick Staplers”, a marginally satirical opus from which you can read a small chunk (which probably is as much as is safe for anyone not wearing a hazmat suit and ten-layer blindfold to digest) courtesy of Amazon’s Look Inside (Before Sticking Your Fingers Down Your Throat) feature. I’d normally say “Enjoy!” here, but on this occasion I’m not sure I can bring myself to. 🙁

However, I was kind of impressed by the way that (the now-defunct) www.linnaeushoffman.com website had only a single entry in the Wayback Machine (from January 2013), a snapshot which contained not even a single webpage: this would seem to have been a successful attempt to construct an entirely unseen corner of the Internet.

It is of course conceivable that “Rohonc Codex: English Translation Paperback” will turn out to be a book industry ‘sleeper’, an unbelievably splendiferous secret hit so beloved by Those Opinion-Makers Who Know (And Indeed Define) What Is Hip And Cool that it has been continuously optioned by every major Hollywood film producer since 2011, whose attempts to bring it to the silver screen have been thwarted solely by the book’s unfilmable brio. But I suspect the odds are somewhat against that scenario. 🙁

Then again, it’s not widely known that Kenneth Grahame’s “The Wind in the Willows” received terrible reviews when it first appeared blinking into the hostile light of day in 1908. It was only unexpected plaudits from US President Theodore Roosevelt that helped make it popular: almost nobody else at the time saw its merits. So who am I to judge a book that I can’t buy or even download (and which I expect was never actually printed)?

I haven’t really put as much time into the Rohonc Codex as I would like: but in my defence, this has been because the available scans are fairly miserable. For example, here’s the scan of the drawing on the page marked ’83’:-

However, a recent post from the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (‘CSMC’) at the University of Hamburg offers us a glimpse of what might be possible with better quality Rohonc scans. (This whole story was broken by Klaus Schmeh’s Krypto Kolumne a few days ago, well done Klaus!)

With this scan, you can clearly make out that this drawing is depicting some kind of curious clockwork device, though – as cipher mysteries connoisseurs would perhaps expect – it’s still as clear as mud what is going on with it.

If only the rest of the Rohonc Codex could be scanned in broadly the same quality, and a proper codicological description of its construction put together! Then we could all really go to town on it, not just Benedek Lang. 🙂

I’ve had a nice email from Marius-Adrian Oancea, asking me if I would look at his interesting Rohonc Codex site. While working for the EU in Fiji between 2009 and 2011 (it’s a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it, I suppose), Marius-Adrian filled his spare time making notes on the Rohonc Codex, and has now written them up in a series of web-pages.

For example, he sets out some persuasive arguments that the text is written from right-to-left (along each line), from top-to-bottom (for lines within each page) and from back-to-front (from page to page).

What is interesting about this is that because I don’t currently believe that the folios (folded pairs of pages) have ended up in the correct order (simply because the chronology of the Biblical pictures seems strangely out of order), it may be possible to identify some candidate facing pages based on matching incomplete half-phrases on the bottom of the right-hand page with incomplete half-phrases on the top of the left-hand page. (I’m not sure that anyone has done this yet.)

He has also found a pair of intriguing repetitive word-skipping sequences on 162L and 162R, where the two instances are each padded out with a different filler “letter” / “word”.

However, I think there is a far simpler explanation for this problematic text than his conclusion that “existing paragraphs were repeated or repeated with insertions […] to create a larger book without making the effort to produce original, non-repetitive text“. What if these inserted filler shapes are both cryptographic nulls? They certainly don’t seem likely to be meaningful, so perhaps they are purely meaningless (nulls): and the fact that the phrase without the nulls also appears on 162L also seems to point that way. It would be interesting to revisit the stats if those two (possibly) null characters were excised from the text stream.

Alternatively, the apparent presence of nulls in the Rohonc Codex’s text might instead mean that the author was trying to duplicate the page structure of an existing manuscript, and that those pages didn’t originally have much text on (and hence needed padding). We’re still not necessarily looking at an enciphered document: we still have no definitive proof of that, but the presence of nulls would seem to be a very strong indication of the presence of encipherment (to my eyes, at least).

Similarly, on the same facing page pair (162L/162R), the author seems to repeat a block of text: though I should also point out that a straightforward explanation for this could be that the encipherer lost their position in the text and ended up enciphering the same block twice in a row. It’s certainly easy to do if you’re not hugely experienced at enciphering.

All in all, I’m not (yet) convinced that “The Codex is written in Hungarian, or at least transliterates words in Hungarian, using a version of the rovásírás (Old Hungarian Alphabet) also known as székely rovásírás or székely-magyar rovás.”. Up to that point in his pages I was feeling quite comfortable with his overall argument, but decomposing symbols into pieces and then anagramming them to get transliterated old Hungarian is a bit more than I was personally able to chew on without choking. Even so, there are plenty of tasty things on Marius-Adrian’s site to get your teeth into. 🙂

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!