Dorabella & D'Agapeyeff Ciphers - Solutions

The message, said to have been sent by Edward Elgar to Miss Dora Penny in July 1897, first appeared in print in 1937, when Dora (by then using her married name Powell) published her book ‘Memories of a Variation’. She revealed that she was never able to deduce the meaning of the cipher; further, that neither she nor Elgar ever mentioned it during his lifetime; that she put the message away safely in a drawer, without any more thought as to its hidden meaning; and that it only resurfaced after the death of Elgar in 1934, when she decided to set out her memories of him in a book. The message was published as an Appendix to the first and subsequent editions. It is 87 characters in total, each character consisting of 1, 2, or 3 hoops (or cusps) pointing in one of the 8 main compass directions, giving an alphabet size of 24 characters. Statistical analysis of the characters suggests a certain roughness but all attempts to date to solve the message have failed to come up with a convincing Plaintext or cryptographic system.