An Enigma, a Cipher, and a Rose

A proposal that Edward Elgar’s Dorabella Cipher has a rose-shaped key, that its decryption includes a list of plants, and that his own Like to the Damask Rose is the long-sought Enigma solution.

Zackery Belanger first proposed the Rose Key and Enigma solution in spring 2021, and an earlier version of this potential cipher solution in fall 2022. This write-up was refined and updated in spring 2025. The author would place his confidence in the key shape and Enigma solutions as high, and his confidence in the cipher solution as moderate. The cipher solution is obscure and would benefit from more research that excludes simpler cipher types (see, for example Wase’s 2023 “Dorabella unMASCed – the Dorabella Cipher is not an English or Latin Mono-Alphabetical Substitution Cipher”). In the following write-up, the author provides support by matching precise characteristics with examples from Elgar’s letters. Feedback and collaboration opportunities are welcome.

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For those wanting to get straight to it, here’s what Like to the Damask Rose and Enigma Variations sound like together in counterpoint:

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In 1899, Edward Elgar’s piece entitled Variations, popularly known as the Enigma Variations, was performed for the first time (McVeagh 2007, 53). It was “Dedicated to My Friends Pictured Within”, and comprised a musical theme and fourteen variations, thirteen of which were inspired by his friends, and the last of which represented himself (Turner 1999, 13). The program contained his words:

The Enigma I will not explain - its “dark saying” must be left unguessed, and I warn you that the connexion between the Variations and the Theme is often of the slightest texture; further, through and over the whole set another and larger theme “goes”, but is not played… So the principal Theme never appears… (Rushton 1999, 65)

Elgar had posed the Enigma: the theme of the Enigma Variations was in the open, but the dark saying and principal Theme were hidden. Neither he, nor his friends - if they knew any answers - would ever reveal them. The principal Theme was later clarified to be “a counterpoint on some well-known melody which is never heard” (Rushton 1999, 72). The unheard melody and dark saying of the Enigma are generally thought to be linked; if the unheard melody is identified, the dark saying could become clear. Many solutions have been proposed (see Turner 1999 for some examples); none have been convincing enough to stick.

Two years prior to the premier of the mysterious piece, in 1897, Elgar sent a note to his friend Dora Penny. Elgar and his wife, Alice, had spent a weekend with Dora and her parents at their home in Wolverhampton, and Alice had written a letter of thanks to them. Elgar tucked his note for Dora inside (Powell 1949, 129). It was encrypted in a strange arced notation and has come to be known as the Dorabella Cipher (Figure 1).

Figure 1: The Dorabella Cipher (scanned from Powell 1949, 129)

The Dorabella’s curved symbols can be assembled into a rose (Figure 2). The individual symbols are frequently described as semicircles, but they could be intentionally petal-shaped. Without rotation or scaling, they open toward a common center, each touching two neighbors in a coherent, rotationally-symmetric formation. Those with more petals naturally sit at a greater distance from the center than those with fewer, and the empty spaces they create sit ready for the insertion of 24 characters: a cipher key.

Figure 2: The Rose Key arrangement of the Dorabella’s symbols.

Dora’s attempts to solve the Dorabella Cipher and the Enigma were unsuccessful. The cipher sat in a drawer for forty years until published in her memoirs in 1937 (Powell 1949, 129), and her pleas to Elgar concerning the unheard melody of the Enigma yielded nothing greater than this famous response:

Well, I’m surprised. I thought that you of all people would guess it. (Powell 1949, 23)

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The author proposes that the Rose Key of the Dorabella Cipher points to Elgar’s 1892 setting of the poem Like to the Damask Rose as the solution to the Enigma, the hidden melody. Elgar scholar Julian Rushton summarizes criteria for the solution to the Enigma (Rushton 1999, 66, 67, 77):

  1. The solution must unveil a dark saying.

  2. The solution must find ‘another and larger theme’ which goes over the whole set.

  3. The solution involves well-known music, or at least something well known.

  4. It must be clear why Dora Penny, ‘of all people’ should guess it.

  5. It should take into account the characteristic falling sevenths of bars 3–4.

  6. The ‘right’ solution, if it exists, while fulfilling the criteria, must be multivalent, deal with musical as well as cryptographic issues, produce workable counterpoint within Elgar’s stylistic range, and at the same time seem obvious (and not just to its begetter).

Like to the Damask Rose is a poem attributed to Simon Wastell (McVeagh 2007, 20) that Elgar set to music in 1892, five years before the Dorabella Cipher and seven before the Enigma Variations premier. It was performed for the first time in February of 1897, five months before the date on the Dorabella Cipher (McVeagh 2007, 214). Its lyrics describe a common fate for its subjects: death.

Like to the damask rose you see,
Or like the blossom on a tree,
Or like the dainty flow’r of May,
Or like the morning of the day,
Or like the sun, or like the shade,
Or like the gourd which Jonas had,
Even such is man, whose thread is spun,
Drawn out, and cut, and so is done:
The rose withers, the blossom blasteth,
The flower fades, the morning hasteth,
The sun sets, the shadow flies,
The gourd consumes, - the man, he dies.

Like to the grass that’s newly sprung,
Or like a tale that’s new begun,
Or like a bird that’s here to-day,
Or like the pearled dew of May,
Or like an hour, or like a span,
Or like the singing of a swan,
Even such is man, who lives by breath,
Is here, now there, in life, and death:
The grass withers, the tale is ended,
The bird is flown, the dew’s ascended,
The hour is short, the span not long,
The swan’s near death, - man’s life is done

In 2021 I reached out to friend, composer, and conductor Nicholas DeMaison, who has conducted the Enigma Variations before. A serendipitous Manhattan snowstorm had cleared his afternoon, and after a live audible test of the idea with his keyboard, he dug in with his usual vigor and fervor. Hours later he came back with: maybe.

Counterpoint is a difficult thing to pin down with certainty, but the fit between Like to the Damask Rose and the theme of the Enigma Variations is particularly promising.

Figure 3: Nicholas DeMaison’s notes that the motive from the bass line “is certainly an attractive point of connection with the falling seventh in the Enigma”

A few qualifications are required for this to work. The piano introduction of Like to the Damask Rose is ignored; the pairing starts when the voice comes in. Only the first six bars are used, though this boundary of the theme of the Enigma Variations has some consensus (Rushton 1999, 23). The two pieces use different phrase lengths, and the bass line only fits for the first four bars. DeMaison assures that, though “it does not prepare and resolve dissonances according to strict 16th century contrapuntal rules, the dissonances do fit well within a looser, more expressive late 19th century notion of consonance and dissonance.”

Composer Steve David Marlow was kind enough to compose the two together so the listener can hear for themselves:

Fourteen deaths occur in Like to the Damask Rose and can be matched with the friends in the Enigma Variations. Elgar’s wife Alice is the damask rose, Dorabella is the bird that’s here to-day, and Elgar himself is the singing swan.

Variation death in Damask Rose Enigma friend

I the damask rose C.A.E.
II the blossom on a tree H.D.S-P.
III the dainty flow’r of May R.B.T.
IV the morning of the day W.M.B.
V the sun R.P.A.
VI the shade Ysobel
VII the gourd which Jonas had Troyte
VIII the grass that’s newly sprung W.N.
IX a tale that’s new begun Nimrod
X a bird that’s here to-day Dorabella
XI the pearled dew of May G.R.S.
XII an hour B.G.N.
XIII a span ***
XIV the singing swan E.D.U.

The structure of Like to the Damask Rose also reflects the linking notes that Rushton points out in Enigma Variations (Rushton 1999, 62-63). Variations I-II are linked, as are V-VI, VIII-IX, and XII-XIII. In Like to the Damask Rose these either mark the beginning of a stanza or share a line:

Variation I links Like to the damask rose you see,
to Variation II Or like the blossom on a tree,
 Or like the dainty flow’r of May,
 Or like the morning of the day,
Var. V links to VI Or like the sun, or like the shade,
 Or like the gourd which Jonas had,
Even such is man, whose thread is spun,
Drawn out, and cut, and so is done:
The rose withers, the blossom blasteth,
The flower fades, the morning hasteth,
The sun sets, the shadow flies,
The gourd consumes, - the man, he dies.


Variation VIII links Like to the grass that’s newly sprung,
to Variation IX Or like a tale that’s new begun,
 Or like a bird that’s here to-day,
 Or like the pearled dew of May,
XII links to XIII Or like an hour, or like a span
 Or like the singing of a swan,
Even such is man, who lives by breath,
Is here, now there, in life, and death:
The grass withers, the tale is ended,
The bird is flown, the dew’s ascended,
The hour is short, the span not long,
The swan’s near death,  man’s life is done

Elgar also dropped some hints of this alignment in My Friends Pictured Within, his “descriptive notes… for production with the pianola rolls” for the Aeolian Company, Ltd (Elgar 1946). To list the most apparent:

  • For I. C.A.E, the damask rose, “romantic and delicate”

  • For IV. W.M.B., the morning of the day, “forcibly read out the arrangements for the day”

  • For V. R.P.A., the sun, “son of Matthew Arnold”

  • For IX. Nimrod, a tale that’s new begun, “the record of a long summer evening talk”

  • For X. Dorabella, a bird that’s here to-day, “a dance-like lightness”

  • For XIII. ***, a span, “the distant throb of the engines of a liner”

Like to the Damask Rose would help explain Elgar’s cap on the number of variations, illuminate his choice of friends to include or omit (Rushton 1999, 7 - 10), settle any doubts over who “***” represented (Rushton 1999, 52), offer an endearing alternative - the sound of a bird  -  to what has come to be thought of as Dora’s stammering in Variation X (Powell 1949, 112), and even resolve the suggested conflict that Elgar was nervous about his work being considered derivative of any other composer, since Like to the Damask Rose was his song.

As for Rushton’s criteria: Like to the Damask Rose would bring a larger theme that goes over the whole set, and unveils a dark saying, that death comes for everyone. While not a famous tune, it could be considered well-known and even obvious in the sense that it’s part of Elgar’s creative body of work. It also takes into account the falling sevenths. If the solution could be found by simply arranging the Dorabella Cipher’s symbols then Dora Penny ‘of all people’ could have guessed it even without a cipher solution. It’s multivalent, musical, and cryptographical. Most importantly, the two fit elegantly in counterpoint and together sound very Elgarian.

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Given that Dora was English and not trained or experienced in codebreaking, it is generally assumed that the Dorabella Cipher’s message is in the English language and encrypted as a simple monoalphabetic substitution cipher (MASC), where each symbol represents one letter of the alphabet. The relatively short 87-character length and lack of word spacings add difficulty to a potential decryption, but it is unusual that a simple MASC of this length would go unbroken.

Most solution attempts begin by assuming it is a MASC, but ultimately yield traits that pull it across some difficult-to-define threshold of believability. These traits can include assumptions of mistakes by Elgar, unexplained omissions or additions of characters, word reversals, phonetic spelling, shorthand, and unjustified deviation from a systematic decipherment process. Bauer (2017, 154) suspects that automated solvers fail due to the message containing intentionally misspelled and invented words, so Elgar wordplay is not wholly unexpected, but context and supporting evidence for previously-proposed solutions is notably lacking. Solutions of this type have been offered by Sams (1970), Gaffney (2008), Roberts (2012), and ShadowWolf (2019). Packwood (2020) proposes a clear and coherent solution, but with a decipherment process that appears to involve arbitrary key shifts in order to produce it.

Hauer et al. (2021a) apply MASC solving techniques including a reliable algorithmic solver without producing a readable solution, and conclude that the Dorabella may not be a simple MASC. Detective work by Schmeh (2018) finds indications that the cipher is a MASC and in English, but without luck in finding a solution when applying largely-forgotten but effective MASC-solving techniques. Pelling (N. Pelling, “Dorabella Cipher first two words decrypted perhaps,” February 24, 2013, https://ciphermysteries.com/2013/02/24/dorabella-cipher-first-two-words-decrypted) has pointed out potential steganographic features but has not proposed a full solution. Mulliss (J. Mulliss, “The Dorabella Cipher - the complete solution,” May 1, 2022, https://jamesmulliss.wordpress.com/the-dorabella-cipher-the-complete-solution/) used Pelling’s work as a starting point for a decryption based on the Dorabella’s symbol spacing, but the proposed result appears to suffer from a similar collection of shortcomings as the MASC solutions already mentioned. Hauer et al. (2021b) have explored potential encoded musical structures, though they have not claimed a definitive solution.

Bauer (2017, 133) suggests that the lack of a convincing solution may point to an encipherment that is more complicated than a MASC. Wase (2023) concluded that the Dorabella Cipher is unlikely to be a MASC by showing that automated MASC solvers have a very high solution rate for ciphers of length 87 characters.

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The proposed Dorabella Cipher key is shown with characters infilled in Figure 4. The letters I and J share a space, as do U and V. Note the sequence beginning at the center of the lowest octant and moving clockwise: FOR CALE... It would surprise no Elgarian if he dedicated a cipher key to his wife, Caroline Alice Lady Elgar. Elgar may have used a pangram that began with FOR CALE to remember the key letter assignments. Guesses could be ventured, but they would be unlikely to ever be definitive.

Figure 4: The proposed Rose Key character layout

The shape of the Rose Key invites the possibility of rotation in the decryption process. The potential for rotation of the Dorabella’s symbols has been noted before. Hartmeier insightfully discussed the symmetry of the symbols and their potential for rotation, pointing out that “... every symbol can be rotated and mirrored, always producing another valid symbol” (D. Hartmeier, “Clues or red herrings to the Dorabella Cipher,” April 27, 2006, https://www.benzedrine.ch/dorabella.html). Pelling also pointed out the possibily for rotation based on symmetry “where you rotate each of the positions around after each letter” (N. Pelling, “Is Dorabella a rotating pigpen?” March 19, 2009, https://ciphermysteries.com/2009/03/19/is-dorabella-a-rotating-pigpen). Bauer (2017, 147) notes that a symbol on Elgar’s Cryptogram Card - one of the few other places his cryptic symbols appear - “starts to lean, then falls over and flips over, as if doing a forward roll.”

The proposed decipherment is begun by taking off the letter from the key that corresponds to the first symbol of the cipher, an I. The key is then rotated an eighth of a turn clockwise - just enough for each symbol to replace the one adjacent - and the second symbol is read, an M. The key is again rotated an eighth of a turn and the third symbol is read, an A. The decipherment proceeds in this fashion except where a dot is encountered, which indicates additional eighth rotations according to the digits of the date (Figure 5).

Figure 5: The dots on lines two and three indicate extra rotations based on the numbers in the date

The dot on line two is relatively unknown and is necessary for the proposed decipherment. It is in contact with the 12th symbol on the second row, and appears only in the 3rd edition of Dora’s book, published by Methuen & Co (Powell 1949, 129). It is unclear why it does not appear in other editions, or how Methuen & Co came to publish a more complete image.

Completing the decipherment yields the plaintext:                   

IMATH PENDO CKWHA MPSIN VIDEA FERN

WALKF REAMB OSAAF EEONS IBNED EDGYR N

SCBOQ BGOTE ZPISA YQETU YCBUE YT

The cleartext is:

I’m Ath. Pendock, Whamp sin vide. A Fern

walk: freambosa, afeeon Sib., neded gyrn,

scb, oq, bgotez, pisay, qet, uyc bueyt

Converting phonetic spellings and expanding abbreviations:

I’m athanaeum Pendock, Wolverhampton sin vide. A fern

walk: framboesa, afion (Siberian), netted gern,

scab, oak, bogotas, picea, qat, euc beaut

All terms after “A fern walk” are plants, described in more detail below. Pendock is a village about 18.5 kilometers from Forli Malvern, Elgar’s home at the time the Dorabella was written. According to Moore (1984, 224), upon returning home from Wolverhampton, Elgar stayed in the region into early August completing the orchestration of his work Te Deum and Benedictus. This indicates that he could have been at Pendock - about an hour by bicycle - on July 14, 1897 to write the Dorabella. Further, Elgar and Dora had a common connection to Pendock. Elgar’s wife Alice had studied geology alongside Dora’s stepmother, Mary Frances Baker, at Pendock Old Church under Rector William Samuel Symonds (Powell 1949, 1). There is also a small Georgian organ in the church, the type for which Elgar wrote two pieces of music, and it is thought that he may have played the instrument (Philipson-Stowe 2005, 7).

Coming from Elgar’s pen, Whamp is a reasonable abbreviation for Wolverhampton. A survey of 426 of Elgar’s letters produced 39 instances of his abbreviations of cities when obvious to the letter’s addressee. Examples include Whampton (Wolverhampton), Hford (Hereford), Lpool (Liverpool), Glouc (Gloucester), Mvn (Malvern), Birm, Bham, B (Birmingham), Bkhptn (Brockhampton), and Mchester (Manchester), among others. A full list is provided in Table 1 in the Appendix.

Table 2 in the Appendix lists 21 occurrences of Latin words and phrases in his English letters, including inter alia, imprimis, solus, sui generis, and passim, among others. The use of sin vide is entirely plausible.

The second sentence reads: Fern walk: freambosa, afeeon Sib., neded gyrn, scb, oq, bgotez, pisay, qet, uyc bueyt. Converting away from phonetic spelling this reads, with common names added in parentheses: Fern walk: framboesa (raspberry), afion Sib. (Siberian poppy), netted gern (netted melon), scab, oak, bogotas (amaryllis), picea (spruce), qat (khat), euc beaut (eucalyptus). The rich botany of the Malvern Hills in mid-July would make it pleasant for a fern walk, and Pendock Old Church has a strong connection to botany: Rector Symonds’ daughter, Lady Hyacinth Jardine, married famed botanist and director of Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Joseph Dalton Hooker, and a plaque in his memory hangs in the Church to this day (Philipson-Stowe 2005, 6).

The survey of 426 of Elgar’s letters yielded at least 68 instances of phonetic spelling. A number of the spellings mirror those in the proposed solution, including:

  • the addition of a superfluous e (freambosa, negligeible, newes)

  • using o to represent double-vowel /ō/ (freambosa, oq, wo, woful)

  • ee for /ē/ (afeeon, deleerious, exspeerience)

  • q to represent /k/ (oq, qopy)

  • s in place of c to represent /s/ (pisay, serremony)

  • z for the /z/ sound of s (bgotez, wizdum)

  • the use of y in place of vowels (gyrn, thys, spellynge)

  • removal of vowels (scb, bgotez, sd, shd)

Of course, Elgar’s motivations were more playful than rigorous, and some examples from his letters deviate significantly from reasonable phonetic representations (e.g. score: skore, skoughre, skourrghe and excuse: xqqq, xqqqq). The list in Table 3 of the Appendix gives an idea of his approach, range, and willingness to experiment.

According to Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew: Plants of the World Online (2022), raspberry (framboesa), poppy (afion), amaryllis (bogotas), oak, spruce (picea), and eucalyptus can all at least currently be found in England, though not all are native. Netted melons are not listed, but can be grown as described by the Royal Horticultural Society (2022). Qat is more difficult to assess because of its amphetamine-like influence on those who chew its leaves, according to the European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction (2022).

The proposed message exhibits some encouraging traits. No mistakes seem to be made by Elgar. The phonetic spelling begins when the plant list does and carries to the end, with all plants having phonetic alterations, and with no preceding words subjected to it. Remarkably, the 25-character first sentence has 15 distinct letters and contains geographical and biographical references, so its weight - if convincing - may bring some legitimacy to the use of those characters in the phonetic spellings that follow. No words span between lines, which fits nicely with the different line lengths of the Dorabella: 29, 31, and 27 characters respectively.

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The codebreaker’s usual practice of direct transcription of arbitrary symbols as a first step (Fauché Gaines 1956, 68) foils the decryption of the Dorabella because the encipherment rotations visually decorrelate its symbols from their corresponding letters. Rotated symbols become indistinguishable from other symbols. The solution proposed in this paper was found using the hillclimbing function of CrypTool 2 (2022) and manual follow-through, but not with a direct transcription of the Dorabella. Instead, an empty key was populated arbitrarily and a transcription was produced by applying the key rotations, shown here with bold letters indicating the dot shifts:

BMYSN RAFKU ZHDNY MROBF CBKAY TAWF

DYXHT WAYML UOYYT AAUFO BLFAK AKGQW F

OZLUP LGUSA IRBOY QPASC QZLCA QS

A tableau can be constructed (Figure 6):

Figure 6: A tableau for the Dorabella Cipher

The tableau begins with a linear representation of the key. Each row that follows simply applies a clockwise eighth rotation to all symbols in the previous row, until all eight key positions are represented. To use in a decipherment, start at the first row of symbols, find the first symbol of the Dorabella, and take off the associated letter above. Then move to the next row for the second symbol. When a dot is encountered, simply skip the designated number of rows. Encipherment would reverse the process. It is worth noting that the symbol sequence in the U column matches the rolling sequence noted by Bauer on Elgar’s Cryptogram Card.

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The author acknowledges Nicholas DeMaison for his help on the fit of Like to the Damask Rose to the Enigma Variations theme in counterpoint, and for recognizing the number 14 in each piece.

The author also thanks Steve David Marlow for arranging and producing the audio files used to demonstrate the counterpoint.

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Elgar, E. 1946. My friends pictured within: The subjects of the Enigma Variations as portrayed in contemporary photographs and Elgar’s manuscript. London: Novello.

European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction. Khat drug profile. Accessed December 29, 2022. https://www.emcdda.europa.eu/publications/drug-profiles/khat_en.

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Gaffney, T. 2008. Dorabella Cipher (14th July 1897) Key. Accessed December 10, 2022. https://i262.photobucket.com/albums/ii112/tony59b/doabell.gif.

Hauer, B., C. Choi, A. Hindle, S. Smallwood, G. Kondrak. 2021b. Dorabella Cipher as musical inspiration. Proceedings of the Workshop on Speech and Music Processing, 33-8.

Hauer, B., C. Choi, A. S. Sundar, A. Hindle, S. Smallwood, G. Kondrak. 2021a. Experimental Analysis of the Dorabella Cipher with Statistical Language Models. Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Historical Cryptography HistoCrypt 2021, 70-9.

McVeagh, D. 2007 Elgar the Music Maker. The Boydell Press.

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Packwood, W. 2020. Elgar as Cryptographer. Musical Opinion Quarterly, July - September 2020, 34-7.

Philipson-Stow, R. 2005. Pendock old church. London: The Churches Conservation Trust.

Powell, Mrs. R. 1949. Edward Elgar: Memories of a variation. 3rd ed. London: Methuen.

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Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. 2022. Plants of the world online. Accessed December 25, 2022. https://powo.science.kew.org/.

Royal Horticultural Society. 2022. How to grow melons. Accessed December 29, 2022. https://www.rhs.org.uk/fruit/melons/grow-your-own.

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Sams, E. 1970. Elgar’s Cipher Letter to Dorabella. The Musical Times, 111(1524), 151-154. https://doi.org/10.2307/956733.

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APPENDIX

Table 1. City abbreviations by Elgar from a survey of 426 of his letters, in alphabetical order with spaces, apostrophes, and periods removed.

Table 2. Latin words and phrases used by Elgar, from a survey of 426 of his letters, in alphabetical order.

Table 3. Phonetic and other unusual spellings used by Elgar from a survey of 426 of his letters, in alphabetical order. Words that use the same phonetic substitution as found in the proposed solution are indicated with an asterisk.

A previous version of this work is available in PDF format here.