Of texts and textiles

Yesterday, if you spend as much time as I do browsing random news articles online, your eye might have been caught by a story with the headline “‘Allah’ is Found on Viking Funeral Clothes.” Similar pieces ran in multiple publications, but I’ll stick with the one in the New York Times, which I think is where I saw it first. Here’s how it begins:

The discovery of Arabic characters that spell “Allah” and “Ali” on Viking funeral costumes in boat graves in Sweden has raised questions about the influence of Islam in Scandinavia. The grave where the costumes were found belonged to a woman dressed in silk burial clothes and was excavated from a field in Gamla Uppsala, north of Stockholm, in the 1970s, but its contents were not cataloged until a few years ago, Annika Larsson, a textile archaeologist at Uppsala University, said on Friday.

Larsson says that she was examining the patterns when she “remembered seeing them in similar Moorish designs in silk ribbons from Spain. I understood it had to be a kind of Arabic character, not Nordic.” The article continues: “Upon closer examination of the band from all angles, she said, she realized she was looking at Kufic script. The words Allah and Ali appeared in the silk found in Boat Grave 36 and in many other graves—and, most intriguing, the word Allah could be seen when reflected in a mirror.” It’s “most intriguing” indeed, particularly because it’s consistent with the hypothesis, which is widely credited, that “the Viking settlements in the Malar Valley of Sweden were, in fact, a western outpost of the Silk Road that stretched through Russia to silk-producing centers east of the Caspian Sea.”

Unfortunately, this particular piece of evidence began to fall apart almost at once. I’d like to say that I felt a flicker of doubt even as I read the article, particularly the part about the pattern being “reflected in a mirror,” but I can’t be entirely sure—like a lot of other readers, I glanced over it briefly and moved on. A few hours later, I saw another story headlined “That Viking Textile Probably Didn’t Actually Have ‘Allah’ On It.” It linked to a very persuasive blog post by Carolyn Priest-Dorman, a textile historian and Viking reenactor who seems perfectly positioned to identify the flaws in Larsson’s argument. As the Times article neglects to mention, Larsson’s reconstruction doesn’t just depend on reflecting the design, but in extending it conjecturally on either side, on the assumption that portions of the original are missing. Priest-Dorman points out that this is unwarranted on the evidence:

This unexplained extrapolation practically doubles the width of the band, and here’s why that’s a problem…If you consult…a photo of Band 6, you can clearly see the continuous metallic weft of the band turning at each selvedge to enter back in the other direction.If Larsson were correct that Band 6 was originally significantly wider, you would not see those turning loops; you’d see a series of discontinuous single passes of brocading weft with cut or broken ends at each edge.

In other words, if the pattern were incomplete, we’d see the breaks, but we don’t. And even if this point were up for debate, you clearly increase the risk of subjective readings when you duplicate, reflect, and otherwise distort the raw “text.”

No one has accused Larsson of intentional fraud, but it appears that the right combination of elements—a source of ambiguous patterns, some erudition, and a certain amount of wishful thinking—resulted in a “solution” to a problem that wasn’t there. If this sounds familiar, it might be because I’ve discussed similar cases on this blog before. One is The Great Cryptogram by Ignatius L. Donnelly, who argued that Francis Bacon was the true author of the works of Shakespeare and left clues to his identity in a code in the plays. An even better parallel is the scholar William Romaine Newbold, who died believing that he had cracked the mysterious Voynich Manuscript. As David Kahn recounts in his masterpiece The Codebreakers, Newbold fell victim to much the same kind of error that Larsson did, except at far greater length and complexity:

Newbold saw microscopic shorthand symbols in the macroscopic characters of the manuscript text and began his decipherment by transliterating them into Roman letters. A secondary text of seventeen different letters resulted. He doubled all but the first and last letters of each section…The resultant quaternary text was then “translated”: Newbold replaced the pairs of letters with a single letter, presumably according to a key, which, however, he never made clear…Finally, Newbold anagrammed the letters of this senary text to produce the alleged plaintext in Latin.

The result, of course, was highly suspect. Anagramming chunks of over a hundred characters at a time, as Newbold did, could result in almost any text you wanted, and the “microscopic shorthand symbols” were nothing but “the breaking up of the thick ink on the rough surface of the vellum into shreds and filaments that Newbold had imagined were individual signs.”

Donnelly and Newbold were working before an era of instantaneous news coverage, but I don’t doubt that they would have received plenty of sympathetic, or at least credulous, attention if they had published their results today—and, in fact, hardly a month goes by without reports of a new “breakthrough” in the Voynich Manuscript. (I’m reminded of the Beale cipher, a similar enigma encoding an alleged hidden treasure that inspired an entire society, the Beale Cypher Association, devoted to solving it. In his book Biggest Secrets, the author William Poundstone examined a copy of the society’s quarterly newsletter, which is available online. It contained no fewer than three proposed solutions.) In the aftermath of the Larsson debacle, a number of observers, including Stephennie Mulder of the University of Texas, raised concerns about how the theory was reported: “It should go without saying that a single scholar’s un-peer-reviewed claim does not truth make.” She’s right. But I think there’s a more specific lesson here. Both Larsson and Newbold started with a vast source of raw material, selected a tiny piece of it, and subjected it to a series of analogous permutations. Larsson doubled the pattern and reflected it in a mirror; Newbold doubled the illusory characters and then anagrammed the result. The first step increased the amount of text that could be “studied,” while the second rearranged it arbitrarily to facilitate additional readings. Each transformation moved further away from the original, which should have been a red flag for any skeptical reader. But when you summarize the process by providing only the first and the last steps, while omitting the intermediate stages, the conclusion looks a lot more impressive. This is exactly what happened with Larsson, and when we turn to Newbold, who announced his findings in 1921, we see how little anything has changed. As Kahn writes in The Codebreakers: “The public at large was fascinated. Sunday supplements had a field day.”

The Shakespeare Code

I don’t think I’ll ever be accused of not having enough strange books in my library, but over the weekend, I picked up a battered copy of one of the most curious of them all: the first and only edition of The Great Cryptogram by Ignatius L. Donnelly, which was initially published in 1888. Donnelly isn’t particularly well known these days, but he’s a fascinating—and peculiarly American—character, an ingenious crackpot who draws on European models while remaining indelibly of his own place and time. He came out of nowhere to become, among other things, the lieutenant governor of Minnesota, a congressman, a state senator, and the founder of a failed utopian community, but he’s best remembered for a series of increasingly odd, and influential, literary productions. His book Atlantis: The Antediluvian World shaped much of the prevailing image of Atlantis as a lost empire that served as the basis of all subsequent civilization, and his Ragnarok anticipates Immanuel Velikovsky, among others, in arguing that a comet collided with the earth 12,000 years ago, altering the planet’s climate and leaving its traces in the myths and legends of a global cataclysm.

The Great Cryptogram was his most ambitious and personal project, a massive tome of over nine hundred pages that argues that Francis Bacon was the true author of the works of Shakespeare and left clues to his real identity—in the form of an elaborate code—in the published text of the plays themselves. I first encountered Donnelly’s theory in The Codebreakers by David Kahn, who rightly dismisses it as a pathological misreading, and even at the time, it was roundly mocked. But there’s something weirdly beautiful about it. Donnelly reproduces pages from the First Folio and his own notes in multiple colors, showing how he selected the words that spelled out Bacon’s secret message, and it would be hugely expensive to print it even today. (In the end, it was an enormous flop. According to Kahn, the book’s publisher had to bring in a special printer to make the plates, and later sued Donnelly for the recovery of advance royalties.) Yet the first half of the book, which lays out the biographical “evidence” for the Baconian hypothesis, could be published tomorrow to an enthusiastic reception. And while I don’t think I’ll ever make it through the whole thing, it’s worth asking why so many people are still so eager to believe that Shakespeare’s plays were written by somebody else.

Donnelly’s core argument is a familiar one. Given the linguistic invention, erudition, and worldly knowledge of the plays, it seems impossible that they could have been written by a rural glover’s son. Bacon, a universal scholar with a suitable pedigree, seems like a much better candidate, although conspiracy theorists from Sigmund Freud to Roland Emmerich on down have settled by consensus on the Earl of Oxford. Yet the anti-Stratfordians are obsessed with solving a problem that doesn’t really exist. Shakespeare’s genius, to the extent it can be broken down, rests on three qualities: an unparalleled way with character, a deep intuition and shrewdness about dramatic structure, and a staggering degree of verbal energy and expressiveness. The first two traits have little, if anything, to do with formal education, and the second, in particular, could have emerged only from the daily, unforgiving grind of performance and playmaking—from the experience of a man, in short, who solved narrative problems for a living. And his language required less in the way of rigorous schooling than access to the right books and the determination to use them as tools. Whether or not he actually owned and annotated a copy of John Baret’s Alvearie, it’s exactly the kind of book he could have used, and it would have gone a long way toward providing the raw material he needed.

As for Shakespeare’s intellectual or philosophical depth, it’s difficult to imagine a writer with this set of traits—that is, an inhuman facility with character, situation, and language—operating for any length of time without yielding ideas of commensurate complexity, even if we glimpse them darkly, or as flashes of lightning that illuminate the text on the way to the next confrontation. Shakespeare was a machine for generating the kinds of ideas that emerge precisely from language and dramatic incident, a verbal magician whose spells produce resonances that can take a lifetime to unpack, and he did it consistently for a quarter of a century. (He also grew up as a writer in public: when you read all the plays in order, as I did a decade ago, it becomes obvious how the richness of the late works comes out of the lessons he learned from his early, more conventional efforts.) To put it another way, a talent like Shakespeare’s is so exceptional, so statistically rare, that his eduction or lack thereof seems like a trivial consideration: the world’s universities offer up thousands of excellent scholars each year, and their achievements are commonplace, even boring, compared to what Shakespeare possessed that can’t be taught. Donnelly, the Oxfordians, and the rest spin incredible webs of tortured logic to justify what is really the least interesting, and the most explicable, aspect of the works they admire. There’s no need to look for a cryptogram here; Shakespeare is already our greatest maker of codes.