Previously Unknown Tales Of Merlin And King Arthur Discovered Hidden In Medieval Texts
When academic Michael Richardson headed into the University of Bristol’s Special Collections Library, the task was a fairly simple and familiar one: look for new reading materials for the University's MA in Medieval Studies. What he didn’t expect to find was an entirely new rendering of the legends of King Arthur, Merlin, and the Holy Grail.
Found bound inside 16th-century books were seven hand-written parchment fragments that, upon closer investigation, Richardson recognized to contain several legendary names, including Merlin the wizard. He quickly contacted Leah Tether, President of the International Arthurian Society, to see if his finds were compelling. Together, the two found that fragments from the original manuscripts tell the stories of Arthurian legends with subtle but significant differences from traditional narratives.
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The texts are thought to come from the Vulgate Cycle or Lancelot-Grail Cycle, old French texts dating back to the 13th century. It’s believed that Sir Thomas Malory, writer of King Arthur’s most famous account Le Morte D’Arthur, used these texts as the main source for his work, which has gone on to inspire most modern retellings of the legend.
Has a Mysterious Medieval Code Really Been Solved?
The Voynich manuscript is not an especially glamorous physical object. It is slightly larger than a modern paperback, bound in “limp vellum” as is the technical term. But its pages are full of astrological charts, strange plants, naked ladies bathing in green liquid, and, most famously, an indecipherable script that has eluded cryptographers to this day.
What could be so scandalous, so dangerous, or so important to be written in such an uncrackable cipher?
This week, the venerable Times Literary Supplement published as its cover story a “solution” for the Voynich manuscript. The article by Nicholas Gibbs suggests the manuscript is a medieval women’s-health manual copied from several older sources. And the cipher is no cipher at all, but simply abbreviations that, once decoded, turn out to be medicinal recipes.
The solution should be seismic news in the Voynich world—for medieval scholars and amateur sleuths alike—but the reaction to Gibbs’s theory has been decidedly underwhelming. Medievalists, used to seeing purported solutions every few months, panned it on Twitter. Blogs and forums started picking at its problems.
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