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Wednesday, January 9, 2008

How Sweet A Voynich...Plant?

Voynich Manuscript
Centuries after surfacing, the Voynich Manuscript still has its mysteries and people are still trying to make heads or tails out of what it is, what it means, and why someone bothered to create it in the first place. 

The arcane tome has a special place for Bellairsians: Prospero and Roger Bacon must battle a curious grimoire with similar (or identical?) properties in The Face in the Frost and Johnny Dixon also has a run in with a similar manuscript in The Wrath of the Grinning Ghost.

Anyway – someone’s attempted to identify some of the herbal scenes from the book and…well…we’ll let Nick Pelling’s Voynich News tell the tale:
"Elias Schwerdtfeger has blogged some speculations on the plant on f3r - essentially that, based on its lack of flowers and various other features, the plant depicted on f3r appears to be some kind of "Nacktsamen" (which I think is German for Gymnospermae, the plant group which includes conifers [fir, spruce, etc], cycads [the sago palm and others], and ginkgo biloba [a plant all on its own]). As normal with the VMs, this is good observation and inference, marred (as he indeed notes) only by the problem that no such plant actually exists."

1 comment:

Coldstone said...

Strangely enough, I ran across a book about this just before the new year:

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?z=y&EAN=9780767914727&itm=5

The title of the book even mentions Bacon, which makes me wonder if Bellairs was inspired by the Voynch book?