Elgar's unread message

The English composer Edward Elgar was a keen cryptographer. The melody of his Enigma Variations - for which the German enciphering machines were named - is supposedly complementary to the melody of a famous song by another composer. He didn't say which.

This melodic mystery is not the only surviving Elgar puzzler. In 1897, he wrote an 87-character code to his friend Dorabella Penny. Forty years later, she published the code in her memoirs but claimed never to have solved it.

In the intervening years, many would-be codebreakers have also drawn a blank. The script appears to contain 24 distinct squiggly symbols spread across three lines. Analysis of the code suggests the symbols could be a simple "substitution cipher", where each symbol is assigned to a letter. But this hasn't produced an answer, so perhaps it is a shorthand language shared only between Elgar and Penny.

Read more at New Scientist