READING · 4 MIN
A LETTER TO A FRIEND.
A CODE SHE NEVER CRACKED.
One of England's most celebrated composers loved codes and puzzles his whole life. He sent one to a close friend in a letter - and never told her, or anyone else, how to read it.
A note folded into a letter, July 1897 â—¢
Edward Elgar - composer of the Enigma Variations, itself built around a puzzle Elgar said he'd never publicly explain - sent a letter in July 1897 to Dora Penny, a young family friend in her early twenties who later married and wrote memoirs about her friendship with the composer. Folded into it was a separate note: three lines, 87 characters total, made entirely of small semicircles rotated into eight possible positions, with no spaces marking word breaks.
She kept it for decades. She never solved it. â—¢
Penny said plainly, in her own later writing about Elgar, that she was never able to work out what it said - despite knowing the composer personally for years and asking him about it. Elgar, for his part, never explained it to her or anyone else during his lifetime. The note survived among her papers and became public well after both of their deaths.
Dozens of proposed solutions, no accepted one â—¢
Because Elgar was a documented cipher enthusiast - he corresponded in codes with friends and clearly enjoyed the craft of a well-built puzzle, in the same spirit as working out a simple substitution by hand - the Dorabella cipher has attracted decades of attempted solutions: word-substitution theories, musical-note mappings tied to his composing habits, and private-joke theories specific to Elgar and Penny's friendship. None has been accepted by Elgar scholars or cryptographers as the definitive answer. At just 87 characters, it's also simply too short for the statistical tricks that crack longer substitution ciphers to work reliably.
Play the ciphers in this story