The Unsolved Sword Code
Geeky is the new sexy. If, like me, you love a good puzzle, then you’re no longer just someone who’s up for a wordsearch of a Sunday afternoon. No, you’re a zeitgeist-busting puzzle-solver. And puzzle-solvers are cool now. Whether it’s Mark Zuckerberg’s hackathons or otterfaced heart throb Benedict Cumberbatch in the Imitation Game, our stock is high. NSA coder Edward Snowdon is so popular that there are multiple agencies desperate to get their hands on him.
With the summer ahead, I’ve packed in the puzzle books and plan to spend long hours by the pool cryptic-crossword-ing away. But now there’s a real-life mystery for me and my fellow-geeks to solve. The British Library have put a 13th Century sword on display in their latest exhibition, and nobody can understand the inscription engraved onto it. The cypher is as follows: NDXOXCHWDRGHDXORVI.
The sword, discovered in a river in Lincolnshire, has outfoxed puzzlers and decoders at the museum and they are hoping that a member of the public will come forward with a solution. The museum’s curator of early modern manuscripts certainly doesn’t seem to have much of a clue. “If you work on the theory that the language is Latin then the opening three initials, NDX, could be Noster Dominus Christus… but then the rest is gobbledegook,” said Julian Harrison; helpfully adding “it’s not Welsh”.
This is not the first time that us armchair puzzlers have been invited to help decode messages which have baffled experts. In 2012 the remains of a World War Two carrier pigeon were discovered in a Surrey chimney, a mystery message attached to its foot. The unsolved code went viral and a historian and amateur puzzler from Canada finally cracked it, apparently in just 17 minutes.
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