Dorabella Cipher

The Dorabella Cipher is an

enciphered letter written by
composer Edward Elgar to Dora
Penny, which was accompanied
by another dated July 14, 1897.
Penny never deciphered it and its
meaning remains unknown.

The cipher, consisting of 87

characters spread over 3 lines, The Dorabella cipher
appears to be made up from 24
symbols, each symbol consisting
of 1, 2, or 3 approximate semicircles oriented in one of 8 directions (the orientation of several
characters is ambiguous). A small dot appears after the fifth character on the third line.

Background
Dora Penny (1874–1964) was the daughter of the Reverend Alfred Penny (1845–1935) of
Wolverhampton. Dora's mother died in February 1874, six days after giving birth to Dora, after
which her father worked for many years as a missionary in Melanesia. In 1895 Dora's father
remarried, and Dora's stepmother was a friend of Caroline Alice Elgar. In July 1897 the Penny
family invited Edward and Alice Elgar to stay at the Wolverhampton Rectory for a few days.

Edward Elgar was a forty-year-old music teacher who had yet to become a successful composer.
Dora Penny was almost seventeen years his junior. Edward and Dora liked one another and
remained friends for the rest of the composer's life: Elgar named Variation 10 of his 1899
Variations on an Original Theme (Enigma) Dorabella as a dedication to Dora Penny.

On returning to Great Malvern on 14 July 1897 Alice wrote a letter of thanks to the Penny family.
Edward Elgar inserted a note with cryptic writing: he pencilled the name 'Miss Penny' on the
reverse. This note laid in a drawer for forty years and became generally known when Dora had it
reproduced in her memoir Edward Elgar: Memories of a Variation, published by Methuen
Publishing in 1937. Subsequently, the original note was lost. Dora claimed that she had never been
able to read the note, which she assumed to be a cipher message.

Composer and historian Kevin Jones advanced one view;

Dora's father had just returned from Melanesia where he had been a missionary for
many years. Fascinated by local language and culture, he possessed a few traditional
talismans decorated with arcane glyphs. Perhaps such an item surfaced as a
conversation piece during the Elgars' week in Wolverhampton? And if Dora recalled
this when writing her memoirs, it might account for the fact the coded message was
referred to as an 'inscription' when communicating with the director of SOAS many
years later.[1]
The Dorabella Cipher is not the only document penned by Elgar that contains the approximately
semi-circular characters. At a concert in April 1886 (over ten years prior to his letter to Penny), he
annotated a concert program with 18 similar characters followed by an underscore. This fragment
became known as the "Liszt fragment". The symbols also appear in a 1920s notebook of Elgar,
along with diagrams resembling clock faces, and on the so-called "Cryptogram card", which forms
part of a series of cards detailing Elgar's solution to a cryptographic challenge set in Pall Mall
magazine in 1896.[2]

Proposed solutions
Eric Sams, the musicologist, produced an interpretation in 1970.[3] His interpretation of the
message is:

STARTS: LARKS! IT'S CHAOTIC, BUT A CLOAK OBSCURES MY NEW LETTERS, A, B

[alpha, beta, ie Greek letters or alphabet] BELOW: I OWN THE DARK MAKES E. E.
SIGH WHEN YOU ARE TOO LONG GONE.

The length of this text is 109 letters (ignoring the parenthetic note on Greek), whereas the original
text contains only 87 or 88 characters: Sams claimed the surplus letters are implied by phonetic
shorthand.

Javier Atance has suggested that the solution is not a text but a melody, the 8 different positions of
the semicircles, turning clockwise, corresponding to the notes of the scale, and that each semicircle
has 3 different levels corresponding to natural, flat or sharp notes.

Tim S. Roberts claims a solution via a simple substitution cipher and offers a statistical
justification:[4][5]

P.S. Now droop beige weeds set in it – pure idiocy – one entire bed! Luigi Ccibunud
luv’ngly tuned liuto studo two.

In December 2011 Canadian cryptographer enthusiast Richard Henderson claimed[6] to have

found the correct clear text, encoded once again as a simple substitution cipher (with two letters as
nulls), although some details remain to be worked out. His solution would read:

whY AM I VERY SAD, BELLE. I SAG AS WE SEE ROSES DO. E.E. IS EVER FOND OF
U, DORA. I kNOw I PeN ONE I LOVe. All Of My Affection.

In July 2020, Wayne Packwood claimed in the journal Musical Opinion to have produced a
complete decryption:[7]

A WOMAN IS LIKE CHESS ONE HAS TO MAKE MANY SACRIFICES FOR ITS
QUEEN IT IS VICTORY SHE COMMANDS NOT DO BETTER
The secondary message below was identified as the word RATS, which Packwood believed was a
playful acknowledgement from Sir Edward to the individual that broke his cipher. Packwood's
method involved rearranging the cipher based on the position of several dots, which Packwood
identified as representing a conductor's baton, and then arbitrarily shifting the presumed values of
each glyph independently until a message emerged. The logic behind the pattern of shifts is not
explained.[7]

2007 Elgar Society Competition

The Elgar Society advertised a Dorabella Cipher Competition in 2007 to mark the 150th
anniversary of Elgar's birth. A number of entries were received but none were found to be
satisfactory: "One or two entries did contain some impressively ambitious and thoughtful analysis.
These entries, though, having matched Elgar's symbols to the alphabet, invariably ended up with a
fairly arbitrary sequence of letters. ... [T]he results read as a disconnected chain of bizarre
utterances, such as an imaginative mind could conjure up from any group of random letters".[8]

References
1. "BBC – Proms – The Dorabella Code" (https://web.archive.org/web/20120316162757/http://ww
w.bbc.co.uk/proms/2007/interact/puzzles/dorabellacode.shtml). Archived from the original (http
s://www.bbc.co.uk/proms/2007/interact/puzzles/dorabellacode.shtml) on 2012-03-16. Retrieved
2009-11-10.
2. Bauer, Craig (2017). Unsolved! The History and Mystery of the World's Greatest Ciphers from
Ancient Egypt to Online Secret Societies. Princeton University Press. p. 127.
ISBN 978-0691167671.
3. Eric Sams (1970). "Elgar's Cipher Letter to Dorabella". The Musical Times. 111 (1524):
151–154. doi:10.2307/956733 (https://doi.org/10.2307%2F956733). ISSN 0027-4666 (https://w
ww.worldcat.org/issn/0027-4666). JSTOR 956733 (https://www.jstor.org/stable/956733).
Wikidata Q115626069.
4. "Archived copy" (https://web.archive.org/web/20130509204122/http://www.cryptologicfoundatio
n.org/content/Educational-Programs/documents/Solving_the_Dorabella_Cipher_v2a.pdf)
(PDF). Archived from the original (http://cryptologicfoundation.org/content/Educational-Program
s/documents/Solving_the_Dorabella_Cipher_v2a.pdf) (PDF) on 2013-05-09. Retrieved
2012-06-19.
5. "Archived copy" (https://web.archive.org/web/20120313000812/http://unsolvedproblems.org/S1
2frev.pdf) (PDF). Archived from the original (http://unsolvedproblems.org/S12frev.pdf) (PDF) on
2012-03-13. Retrieved 2011-12-29.
6. Henderson, Richard. "Dorabella Solved" (https://web.archive.org/web/20120317054900/http://w
ww.aerobushentertainment.com/crypto/index.php?PHPSESSID=1a5ace6c33ee2f2b62ec10871
938d7e4&topic=174.0). Ancient Cryptography. Archived from the original (http://www.aerobush
entertainment.com/crypto/index.php?topic=174.0) on 17 March 2012. Retrieved 19 December
2011.
7. Packwood, Wayne (2020). "Elgar as cryptographer – Tuning and Turing" (https://www.proquest.
com/docview/2423815327). Musical Opinion. Vol. 143. pp. 34–37. ProQuest 2423815327 (http
s://search.proquest.com/docview/2423815327).
8. No longer on Elgar.org: archival copy at "Intro to the Cipher" (https://web.archive.org/web/2011
0707092100/http://www.aerobushentertainment.com/crypto/index.php?topic=4.msg388).
Archived from the original (http://www.aerobushentertainment.com/crypto/index.php?topic%3D
 4.msg388#msg388) on 2011-07-07. Retrieved 2010-02-08.

External links
▪ http://www.elgarfoundation.org/
▪ http://www.bbc.co.uk/proms/2007/interact/puzzles/variations.shtml
▪ Dunin, Elonka, 2006, The Mammoth Book of Secret Codes and Cryptograms,
ISBN 0-7867-1726-2 (contains an image of the cipher)
▪ http://unsolvedproblems.org/index_files/dorabella.htm
▪ (in French) The Dorabella Code (http://thedorabellacode.blogspot.co.uk)
▪ http://unsolvedproblems.org/S121.pdf