![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beowabbitMediaeval word puzzles, courtesy of Retronaut. I can’t quite tell whether they’re actually puzzles of some sort or just passages written in a grid like Seek-and-Find. They’re not that; they’re legible Latin left-to-right, but I suspect there’s something deeper hidden in the layout. (The phrasing seems a little odd, and the lack of spaces — the letterforms are clearly from a time when spaces would have been used — and features like the consistent use of Q alone for QU suggest some kind of puzzle.) The site where I found them doesn’t have much information; anybody whose Latin (or patience) is better than mine want to take a guess at what the puzzle is?
(This is a little more retro than Retronaut’s usual fare, but they have some interesting stuff.)
(This is a little more retro than Retronaut’s usual fare, but they have some interesting stuff.)
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2013-02-27 18:20 (UTC)I don't see a puzzle aspect. At first glance, they would seem to be word search puzzles, but if you read straight across, right to left, line by line, it's just Latin text written in a grid format. The illuminator *may* have arranged things so that the word breaks always fall at the end of the line, which is cool, though a little easier in Latin, where you can rearrange words a little more freely.
And yet...
The letters in the picture are definitely meant to be read as part of the background: in the first picture (saint holding cross), the sixth line starts SPERAREH[I]NC[V]ITA..., where the bracketed letters are red-on-gold instead of background, and that reads "sperare hinc vita", i.e. "to hope (by) this life"; SPERAREHNCITA is gibberish.
But if you read *down* that staff, you get
CEXRI[SNVGO]TETVAVICTORIAVERASALVS...
(where the bracketed letters here are on the saint's hand, and *not* in red-on-gold). My Latin is not remotely good enough to translate this, but there's no way that it just coincidentally reads "TUA VICTORIA VERA SALUS". So while there's not a *puzzle* per se, there's definitely some very clever arrangement of words that's giving a highlighted message.
In most of the other pictures, the red-on-gold is too hard to read, and my Latin is *definitely* not good enough to fill in the gaps from the surrounding text.
no subject
Date: 2013-02-28 12:33 (UTC)Of course, it's in French, but that may be a bit more accessible than the Latin
no subject
Date: 2013-03-13 01:51 (UTC)