The Dorabella Dots “VAGUE DEED” Cipher

Dora Penny (Dorabella)

E.E. [Edward Elgar] used to chaff me about the Choral Society, and if I made any sort of criticism he would say: “What do you know about it? You’re only a Chorus Girl!”

Dora Powell (née Penny)

The English composer Edward Elgar (1857–1934) and his wife Alice enjoyed a five-day visit in mid-July 1897 with the family of Reverend Alfred Penny (1845–1934), the rector of St. Peter’s Collegiate Church in Wolverhampton. Caroline Alice Elgar (1848–1920) was a childhood friend of the Reverend’s wife, Mary Frances Baker, who married the widower in 1895 and became the stepmother of his only daughter, Dora Penny (1874–1964). On their return to Great Malvern, Alice penned a letter to Mary thanking the Penny family for their hospitality. Elgar added a short enciphered missive to his wife’s note, addressing it to “Miss Penny” on the back. The incisive salutation is a classic Elgarian pun. “Miss” is an honorific title for an unmarried woman or girl, but it also functions as the verb “miss” to express regret or sadness over a person’s absence. Elgar was clearly missing Miss Penny when he created his cryptographic pièce de résistance. Dora was unable to decipher Elgar’s enigmatic script and filed it away for over 40 years before eventually publishing it in her 1937 memoir, Edward Elgar: Memories of a Variation.

Elgar’s coded message to Dora Penny is popularly known as the Dorabella Cipher. The name comes from Variation X of the Enigma Variations (1899), a movement dedicated to her that bears the title “Dorabella.” Elgar procured that playful pseudonym from a soprano role for a young unmarried woman in the opera Così fan tutte by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791). An operatic nickname for Dora is appropriate as she was an avid vocalist who sang in the Wolverhampton Choir Society and her father’s rectory choir. As she reminisces in her biography, “I was so mixed up with tunes in those days; Choral music, Church music, and orchestral music – and my own solo-singing, scenes from opera, songs, ballads –, and so on.” Four months before his visit to her father’s rectory, Elgar penned a brief letter to Dora in which he humorously comments about her weekly singing sessions. He wrote, “Alice tells me you are warbling wigorously in Worcester wunce a week (alliteration archaically Norse).” This amusing excerpt is one of many examples where Elgar employs idiosyncratic spellings in his correspondence.

Variation X (Dorabella) from My Friends Pictured Within

The Dorabella Cipher consists of 87 curlicue symbols arranged in three uneven rows of varying character lengths followed by a fourth row giving the date “July 14 [18]97” with the century omitted. There are 29 characters in row one, 31 in row two, 27 in row three, and 8 in row four. A conspicuous dot is positioned above the sixth symbol in row three, the 66th symbol in the cryptogram. Three others appear in row four with small dots to the right of the numerals 1 and 4, and a larger dot affixed to the bend in 7. In all, there are 87 symbols, four rows, four dots, four letters, and four numbers on the Dorabella Cipher.

The Dorabella Cipher

Fortunately for investigators, the key to translating Elgar’s confounding cast of characters into recognizable cleartext is preserved in one of his surviving notebooks dating from 1924. A facsimile of that key is displayed below:

Elgar’s notebook key (1924)

Elgar created three distinct glyphs using the lowercase c as the primary building block. His motive for selecting that particular letter is easy to surmise as c is the initial for cipher and cryptogram. There is persuasive evidence in support of this hypothesis as Elgar wrote some of those identical symbols around the word “Cryptogram” on an index card dating from 1896.

Elgar’s “Cryptogram” card with ciphertext (circa 1896)

With his three prototypes assembled from one, two, and three stacked cs, Elgar systematically arranged them into eight different triplets using various angles and orientations to generate twenty-four alphabetic avatars. Elgar assigned the English alphabet’s twenty-six letters to these twenty-four odd characters by conflating i with j, and u with v. Combining similar glyphs is a standard convention of cryptography. The resemblance of some of Elgar's curlicue characters to the capital cursive “E” from his initials is deliberate, embellishing the cipher with his imprimatur in contrasting guises and angles. There are thirty-three “E” glyphs in the Dorabella Cipher, making it the most numerous symbol in the cryptogram. The number “33” is a coded form of Elgar’s initials as it is the mirror image of two capital cursive Es.

To facilitate cryptanalysis, letters encoded by Elgar’s twenty-four cryptic characters were converted into their serial numbers (1=a, 2=b, 3=c, etc.), a process that generates a rudimentary number-to-letter key.

The application of Elgar’s notebook key to the Dorabella Cipher generates the following cleartext:

Elgar employed twenty symbols from his lineup of twenty-four characters, omitting those for m, n, o, and z. The three contiguous absent letters (m, n, o) are an anagram of nom, the French word for “name.” It appears in nom de plume, a French expression for a pseudonym or pen name. Elgar’s signature is conspicuously absent from his coded missive. Could this nom anagram sourced from his missing letters be a clue that Elgar’s name is hidden within the ciphertext? The absence of these four letters parallels the structural emphasis placed on that number by four rows, four dots, four letters, and four numbers. Elgar is clearly hinting at the importance of the number four. One explanation could be that the fourth letter of the alphabet is D, the initial for Dora, a four-letter name.

Cryptographers are baffled by the Dorabella Cipher’s seemingly incoherent cleartext. In his history of unbroken cryptograms titled Unsolved!, mathematics professor Craig P. Bauer concedes that the Dorabella Cipher appears to be a simple monoalphabetic substitution cipher (MASC) in which one letter is replaced by one symbol. Gaps between words are excised to make the code even more difficult to unravel. Like modern ciphers, ancient Greek and Classical Latin text omit spaces between words in a practice called scriptio continua. Bauer laments that when applied to the Dorabella Cipher, none of the standard techniques for solving a MASC yield any sensible or credible results. Even the most advanced computer programs fail to make any inroads. A limitation of this approach is the presumption that Elgar’s message is a MASC restricted to English. Bauer briefly describes and dismisses purported solutions by Eric Sams, Tony Gaffney, and Tim S. Roberts, before concluding that the Dorabella Cipher has not yet been solved because Elgar’s system of encipherment must be “something more complicated.”

A cryptanalysis of the seemingly impregnable Dorabella Cipher determined that its dotted symbols encode some interesting four-letter solutions. The first dot in row three designates the 22nd character from the end of row three. In Elgar’s cipher alphabet, the 22nd symbol is the letter X. The dotted numbers in the date are 1, 4, and 7 which convert into the letters A, D, and G. Those three letters are an anagram of “AGD”, the acronym for the Latin saying, “Ad Gloriam Dei” (To God’s Glory). The X is the St. Andrew’s cross, a heraldic symbol called a saltire. One of the first Apostles to follow Christ, St. Andrew was martyred in Greece on an X-shaped cross because he deemed himself unworthy to die in the same manner as Jesus. Elgar associated the letter X with the cross because he wrote “Xtian” in place of Christian. Consequently, the anagram “AGDX” translates into “Ad Gloriam Dei” and “St. Andrew’s Cross.”

Like turning the dial on a combination safe, rotating the capital cursive E 90 degrees to the right replicates the letter M. Elgar applies that technique to symbols 6, 19, 33, 43, 50, 63, 74, and 83 in the Dorabella Cipher. The letters “MADG” is an anagram of “AMDG,” the abbreviation of the Latin motto “Ad majórem Dei glóriam” (For the greater glory of God) adopted by the Society of Jesus, a Roman Catholic organization. Elgar wrote “A.M.D.G.” as a dedication for his major sacred works such as The Dream of Gerontius (1900), The Apostles (1903), and The Kingdom (1906). The four periods in that acronym are reminiscent of the four dots on the Dorabella Cipher. A Roman Catholic dedication in a coded message to an Anglican Rector’s daughter is fraught with irony. The Dorabella Dots “AMDG” Cipher is the counterpart to the “Dorabella Dots “AGDX” Cipher.

The cleartext “MADG” is also an anagram of “MAGD,” an archaic German word for maid that refers to a young unmarried woman. Such a solution is contextually appropriate as Dora was twenty-three years old and unmarried when she received Elgar’s coded message. Like the “AMDG” Cipher, there is yet another Roman Catholic slant to this solution. One of the many titles of the Virgin Mary is “the pure maid.” Trained as an Augustinian monk and scholar, Martin Luther refers to the Virgin Mary as Magd in his hymn “Sie ist mir lieb, die werte Madg” (She’s dear to me, the worthy maid). Madg is a German title for the Virgin Mary, an important spiritual figure in Roman Catholicism and other Christian denominations. Dora replaced her middle name with “Mary” in memory of her mother (née Dora Mary Heale). Dora’s stepmother (née Mary Frances Baker) also shared that name. Consequently, the German anagram Magd subtly hints at Dora’s middle name as well as those of her mother and step-mother. This cryptogram is called the Dorabella Dots “MAGD” Cipher.

It is commonly presumed that Elgar encoded the Dorabella Cipher in English. This assumption is supported by Elgar’s letters to Dora which are written in that language. However, a meticulous inspection of the raw transcription of the Dorabella Cipher found that virtually all of its vowels form parts of Spanish words. Four letters (m, n, o, and z) are absent from the transcript, restricting the available pool of vowels to four (a, e, i, and u). Characters 2-5 in the first row spell peca, the Spanish noun for “freckle” and “spot.” Characters 10 and 25 are y, the Spanish conjunction “and.” Characters 16-17 spell ir, the Spanish verb meaning “go.”

Characters 38-42 in the second row spell cerré which is Spanish for “I closed.” The 60th character at the end of row two followed by the 61st character at the beginning of the third row spell sé, the Spanish expression for “I know.” This identical letter sequence is replicated two more times in row three by symbols 65-66 and 71-72. Characters 61-62 spell es, the Spanish word for “is.” Characters 65 through 67 spell sed, the Spanish word for “thirst.” The latter two letters of sed overlap with the first two from Elgar’s pet name (Edu). The pronunciation of sed is virtually identical to “said.” Symbols 71-73 spell ser, the Spanish verb “to be.” The proximity of es and ser in the third row is relevant because es is the third person singular of ser.

The word peca enciphered by characters 2-5 is Spanish for spot, a term in the raw decryption which resonates with four conspicuous spots sprinkled within the cryptogram. The pairing of ir (go) with peca (spot) in row one suggests going to the first spot in row three. Below that seemingly insignificant dot, the transcription reads “EDU/V.” That is an important series of letters because “Edu” is a pseudonym for Elgar coined by his wife. It is noteworthy that the last three letters of peca present an anagram of Alice’s initials. One coded form of initials embedded in the Spanish word for spot led to spotting a second set of initials camouflaged by the raw ciphertext. Cryptanalysts failed to spot the significance of “EDU” in the cleartext because they did not consider the possibility that Elgar would encode his pseudonym.

Elgar’s wife coined the pet name “Edoo” using the first three letters of the German version of her husband’s forename, Eduard. Elgar assigned this pseudonym to his musical self-portrait in the Enigma Variations (1899), the martial Finale with the title “E.D.U.” Dora Penny was familiar with this pet name as she spent a substantial amount of time around the Elgar family and heard Alice call her husband “Edoo.” This fragmentary decryption confirms that the Dorabella Dots Dedication Cipher is covertly signed by its author. The solution comports with the feasibility of spelling nom from absent letters in the cipher and the glaring absence of Elgar’s signature from his note. The discovery of Elgar’s nickname is consistent with other cryptograms in the Enigma Variations that are similarly tagged by his name or initials.

Variation XIV. (E.D.U.) from My Friends Pictured Within.

Far from being an entirely random assortment of letters as posited by investigators like Dr. Keith Massey, the cleartext presents a coded form of Elgar’s name expertly woven into the fabric of the cleartext. Elgar made it an obvious place to look because of the anomalous dot above the sixth character in row three. This “EDU” Dot Cipher furnishes the author’s signature conspicuously missing from his missive to Miss Penny. It is astonishing that his signature remained undetected since the cipher was first publicized 87 years ago. One reasonably wonders what else the so-called experts failed to detect lurking just beneath the surface of the Dorabella Cipher’s cleartext. After all, Elgar’s encoded signature was not difficult to spot.

The Dorabella Dots “VAGUE DEED” Cipher

It is a privilege to report the discovery of another cryptogram associated with the anomalous dots on the Dorabella Cipher. A dot in Morse Code represents the letter E, so four dots translate into four Es. The first anomalous dot on in the third row pinpoints the cleartext “EDU” which is Elgar’s pet name. As previously observed, the application of an elementary number-to-letter key to the dotted numerals in the date (1, 4, and 7) yields the cleartext A, D, and G. The pattern of those three dots in the date hints at the letter V. In alphabetical order, those letters are A, D, D, E, E, E, E, E, G, U, and V. These eleven letters may be arranged into the anagram “VAGUE DEED EE.”

The Cambridge Dictionary defines vague as “not clearly expressed, known, described, or decided.” It further defines deed as “an intentional act, especially a very bad or a very good one.” The adjective vague is a suitable adjective to describe a coded message. The noun deed is a fitting term to characterize a seemingly insoluble cipher. Remarkably, deed is comprised of forward and backward spellings Elgar’s forename (Ed) with the central letters supplying his initials. The anagram “VAGUE DEED” is signed by Elgar’s initials “EE.”

The discovery of the Dorabella Dots “VAGUE DEED” cipher is reviewed in my white paper Decoding Elgar’s Dorabella Cipher. It is plausible that other subciphers still remain to be discovered in the Dorabella Cipher. Decrypting these cryptograms require nothing more advanced than Elgar’s notebook key, an elementary number-to-letter key, a familiarity with Morse Code, and rearranging the resulting cleartext into anagrams. The evidence confirms that the Dorabella Cipher was designed for a novice to decipher. To learn more about the secrets of the Enigma Variations, read my free eBook Elgar’s Enigmas Exposed. Please help support and expand my original research by becoming a sponsor on Patreon.

Soli Yah Gloria