The Elgar Enigma series celebrates the 150th anniversary of
Elgar's birth, the countryside that so inspired him and his first
widely recognised work, Variations on an Original Theme, more
commonly known as The Enigma Variations.
|
Variation X (Intermezzo: Allegretto) DORABELLA was dedicated to
Dora Penny, the stepdaughter of the sister of William Meath Baker,
inspiration for the fourth variation, and sister-in-law of Richard
Baxter Townsend, inspiration for the third. The nickname DORABELLA
comes from the character in Mozart's Cosi fan Tutte. She was a long
time family friend of the Elgars and, like Elgar, a Wolverhampton
Wanderers fan.
Elgar was very interested in word play and encryption. In 1897
Dora received a letter from Elgar encrypted with a cipher which to
this day has not been read. The cipher consisted of twenty four
characters with either one, two or three loops and rotated in units
of 45 degrees. Frequency analysis suggests a substitution cipher
but further investigations along these lines have been fruitless;
there are probably multiple encryptions. The message still
intrigues today.
|
Dora Penny
Dorabella Cipher
|
British Camp
|
The cache is hidden near British Camp, the most easily
recognisable of the Malvern Hills due to its Iron Age defensive
embankments. Dora Penny did used to walk with Elgar on the hills
but British Camp has another association with Elgar. When visiting
his mother, Ann, in nearby Colwall she mentioned the legend of
Caractacus and his last battle with the Romans on the hill and
asked if Elgar could write something about it. Thus, he wrote the
cantata. It has been suggested more recently that British Camp was
not the location for this battle but it is a nice story.
|
With this being the cache associated with DORABELLA it had to be
an encrypted message:
H is still feeling generous so she decided to offer some hints
on how to decipher the message...
- Normally when faced with an encrypted message you should use
frequency analysis. No matter what the message, if each letter has
been substituted consistently for a different symbol the count of
each of symbols would follow the same pattern. This indicates a
substitution cipher where a is one symbol, b another, and so on.
This message is encrypted using a substitution cipher.
- For a long message the most frequent letter is e followed by t,
a, i, n, o, etc. So count up each symbol and the most common is e.
Note, however, that numbers written as words do not contain the
letter a!
- You know some of the numbers because the cache is near the
coordinates above.
- You might like to try to look for patterns that could indicate
words such as north, west, degrees and minutes.
- Finally you should have enough substitutions to guess the last
few.
- It is not that difficult but you have to be exact and spend
some time on it.