Mysterious doodles hidden in a 1,300-year-old book

[willvarfar]

> Hodgkinson figured that the first symbol was a cross, followed by "Eadburg": almost certainly the name of the book's owner.

> The subsequent letters were a bit more enigmatic: could it mean "bears cwærtern" – the Old English word for "prison"? The Latin passage it accompanies describes the imprisonment of the Apostles, so Eadburg might have been drawing a parallel with her own situation.

A completely different interpretation jumped to my mind which I feel is at least equally plausible:

A young novice, stuck in her cell and told to read the bible, vents her frustration by scratching that the abbess Eadburg is keeping her in prison. And doodles in other margins, using just her nail or sharp splinter or something because that's what she had that she could use. Its defacement, vandalism, revolt. And perhaps it was never detected?

[mc32]

I wonder, if there is no evidence of inks, dyes, etc. accompanying these marks in velum, could this have been a medium under the directly marked medium? So two "sheets" one on top of the other where this sample was on the bottom of and another that was being marked was on top and we're left with these enigmatic doodles and scratches?

[wrp]

Given the crude form of the letters, I like your interpretation better. Books were extremely expensive and cherished items. I expect an adult wanting to personalize a book would have taken greater care.

[uhtred]

Your interpretation is not very different to the journalists:

> The subsequent letters were a bit more enigmatic: could it mean "bears cwærtern" – the Old English word for "prison"? The Latin passage it accompanies describes the imprisonment of the Apostles, so Eadburg might have been drawing a parallel with her own situation.

I agree with the journalist though-- it seems more plausible to me that Eadburg was the doodler. It was very common when I was at school to scratch something like "SW was here" into a table.

Eadburg was here in nun prison.

[davidhay]

Would have been funny if it was that S thing from middle school. For reference... https://miro.medium.com/max/480/0*ypNCKOnhr4RhWR3A.png

[zach_garwood]

We called it the "cool S" when I was in school.

[867-5309]

ah, the sans-serif version of the Slipknot S

https://i.pinimg.com/736x/83/2f/a4/832fa4f4985dbcb7ebce92178...

[thedriver]

Humans weren't fundamentally any different back then. Bathroom wall graffiti has been discovered from ancient Roman ruins.

[OJFord]

That was my first thought, but I found the article way more interesting than the title suggests.

Lest anyone else be put off - the doodles are just one example of something not (or barely) visible without the new imaging techniques described. It's about finding new artefacts in an existing collection, not 'oh wow so weird an ancient human doodled something'.

[martopix]

I will always remember one reported on my high school Latin textbook: "Apollinaris medicus Titi imperatoris hic cacavit bene": "Apollinar, physician of the emperor Titus, here pooped well"

[DrBazza]

If you visit Hadrian's Wall in the north of England you can see Roman graffiti there.

I find it curious that archaeologists or historians (?) seem to take a lot of things like this so seriously and assume everything has some sort of symbolic meaning, rather than just some teenager scribbling on a page or painting his hand on the wall of a cave just 'because'.

[niemandhier]

The first of the 'Doodles in the Eadburg' looks like "Bernd das Brot", a famous German childrens TV character.

[teddyh]

They are all, like Spongebob Squarepants, “tadpole men” (a figure lacking a torso, with arms and legs – sometimes only hands and feet – attaching directly to a head) which is a common form in children’s drawings: https://www.nature.com/articles/254416a0

[lofatdairy]

Reminds me of Onfim: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onfim

[chungy]

https://archive.is/20230215040804/https://www.bbc.com/future...

[bentobean]

Have they ruled out the possibility that these could be two week old doodles in a 1,300 year old book?

[twic]

I would have said it doesn't seem very likely that someone would have gone into a library and doodled on a book in Old English, but this is in Oxford.

[mrg3_2013]

yeah! I don't know how they can date the doodles. Same issue with cave paintings, unless somehow they can date the paintings

[JoeAltmaier]

Couldn't they be impressions left by writing on something laid on the page?

[joshu]

reminds me of https://www.hpl.hp.com/research/ptm/papers/ptm.pdf

[telman17]

I always wonder how they actually date things like this. Carbon dating? Something else? Is it obviously apparent to an expert if a manuscript is 800 or 1000 years old?

(Additionally, I feel rather foolish that my first thought went to the hybrid poodle breed when I read the topic headline. My own doodle was at my feet though so it’s not completely my fault. )

[arnsholt]

Carbon dating can help, since it gives an upper bound on the age (a terminus post quem if you want to be fancy; the manuscript wouldn't have have been written while the parchment was still hide on a cow) and the pages would probably have been written on fairly recently after being turned into parchment. Of course parchment can have its initial contents scraped off and reused, or overwritten which complicates matters. But as you say, an expert palaeographer can probably eyeball the age of a manuscript quite often, since the style of handwriting is largely dictated by both time and place. For example, to my (untrained) eye the hand in the manuscript in the article looks a bit like an insular script[0], which is specific to the British isles at time in question. An Italian of French manuscript of similar age would have a different script. And as others have pointed out for some manuscripts record sleuthing can find stuff surprisingly far back.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insular_script

,

[Cthulhu_]

Aren't manuscripts / books usually dated? I'm reading the current-day years-based-on-the-birth-of-jesus only came in full swing around 700, which would be around the time these manuscripts were made. But there will have been other ways to indicate when it was written / what year it was.

[psychoslave]

You can rather easily infer a earliest possible date based on multiple ways, and of course intersect them to make a more solid hypothesis.

One thing is that human being generally very bad at predicting specific future event, if a text depict such an event, chances are good that the document was written after this event.

There are also things like which script/police was used, as well as other philologists cues.

The material used to make the document can also give you a rough idea of when it was created, even without isotopic analysis: people didn’t have easy access to the same technologies and primary material over time and region.

Of course, counterfeit of something that seems older than it really is always a possibility. Time travel to the past is far less probable though. :)

[psychphysic]

From records [0]. Interestingly the book had some blank pages filled with extra prayers by someone later.

You can't conceivably carbon date a scratch.

But the book could easily be carbon dated but that process has its own difficulty [1] and relates only to the time the animal or other organic matter the book is made of.

[0] https://medieval.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/catalog/manuscript_8904

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01499-y

[TT-392]

Maybe it was originally visible, but written with a kind of ink that has weathered away over the years, and only the creases the pen left behind are still visible? Or something similar, maybe a kind of ink that was easy to erase on purpose, like pencil, and after erasing, only these creases were left?

[raldi]

Or maybe they put another paper on top of this one and wrote on it with a quill, leaving an impression on the sheet below.

[walnutclosefarm]

Brilliant use of tech to reveal things just below our ability to perceive, and raise fascinating questions of history. Lovely article.

[kameit00]

Sponge Bob!? :-o

[pvaldes]

This drawings are recent, clearly done with a ball point pen in my opinion. Is easy to prove it with a trivial test

Religious books were used to teach children for a long time. And people copying draws (the hunter scene is a copy, not an original) on papers put over schoolbooks explain the issue perfectly

The small figures are an "aha!" in disguise, probably modified later by a child that had a change of mind.

[raldi]

Why not a quill?

[Femtiono]

We need to redefine what words meaiif everything we just don't know is labeled mysterious

[evilc00kie]

wow, didn't know mspaint is this old :D

[btwillard]

Eh, Steve!?