At a glanceNot solved · text not obtained
- The document
- Engraved, silver-inlaid capital letters on both faces of a sword blade, 285 mm per face, between crosses.
- Where
- Found in 2002 in the Rhine bed at Alphen aan den Rijn, in a layer later than the damming of the Kromme Rijn in 1122; Provincial Depot Bodemvondsten Zuid-Holland no. 8888. Script of the 12th or early 13th century.
- The cipher
- None shown. The text is an invocation in abbreviations (SCS, IS, X, DIC) and name-like groups, the same formula family as nine other blades.
- How it was tried
- The drawing from the published photographs, letter counts, an alignment of both faces to the published readings of the sibling blades, and a language check.
- Why it resists
- 56 of 79 letters fall in recognised formula elements, but those expansions are the sibling authors’ tentative ones, and F T, RR, EC, NI, ICCC and the DIO groups have none.
- Credit
- Marc van Hasselt for the transcription; Thomas Wagner, John Worley, Anna Holst Blennow and Gunilla Beckholmen for the family readings applied here.
- Still open
- Everything outside the formula elements, and whether the formula itself means what they suggest.
01 The inscription
Marc van Hasselt prints the two faces in Madoc 28/2 (2014), drawn from Restaura’s photographs:
+BENEDOXOFTISSCSDRRISCDICECMTINIUSCSDNI+
+DIOXMTINIUSESDIOMTINIUSCSDICCCMTDICII7ISI+
The 7 is as printed and reads like a Z. The inlay is corroded, and earlier forum transcriptions (Peters, 2011) differ in several letters, so the drawing is used here. The published photographs show the letters but are not freely licensed, so none is reproduced. The vowel rate (32% and 41%) shows this is not an initials-only string, unlike the Witham sword.
| face | letters | vowels | repeated |
|---|---|---|---|
| A | 38 | 12 (32%) | MTINIUSCSD also on B |
| B | 41 | 17 (41%) | MTINIUS three times in all, DIC three times |
02 The sibling blades
Eight other blades were used here: Karlstad, Fyris UMF/B 74, W 1830, W 897, W 879, Marburg, Saint-Omer and one from Finland. Wagner, Worley, Holst Blennow and Beckholmen (2009) read them as Christian invocations: SCS is S(an)c(tu)s (the abbreviation stroke is visible on the Fyris blade), D is Dominus, X is Christus, IS is the ligature for Iesus, and MTINIUS is M(ar)tinius or Mauricius. In Wagner’s 2013 account the Alphen blade shows the SCS, DIC, BENE and NED marks at once, which he takes to show that the older classification into groups does not hold.
03 A parse against the family
I aligned both faces to the published sibling readings. The longest matches are ISSCSD (face A, with Fyris 74 …ERNISSCSDX…), OXMTINIUS (face B, with W 1830 …ISROXMTINIUSRN) and BENED (face A, with the Finnish blade). Applying their expansions gives:
| face | segmentation |
|---|---|
| A | BENED | O X O | F T | IS | SCS D | RR | IS C | DIC | EC | MTINIUS | CS D | NI |
| B | DIO | X | MTINIUS | ES D | IO | MTINIUS | CS D | ICCC | MT | DIC | II Z IS | I |
That is, roughly: May he bless … O Christ … Jesus; holy Lord … Jesus Christ … Martinius, holy Lord …. Thirty of the 38 letters on face A and 26 of the 41 on face B (56 of 79, 71%) sit in these elements. F T, RR, EC, NI, ICCC, II Z I and the DIO groups do not, and every expansion is the sibling authors’ guess, so this is a family-level parse and not a decipherment. A language check on the letters puts Latin first, narrowly, which fits plain Latin in abbreviation and does not fit a substitution. No key exists to recover.
04 What has been proposed
- Marc van Hasselt, 2012 and 2014. BENED(ict)O CH(rist)O … S(an)C(tu)S, which he says “doesn’t make a lot of sense”; MTINIUSCS as Martinius Sanctus, with St Mauritius floated. J. P. Gumbert, Wagner and several Latinists consulted in 2014 reached no agreed expansion. He links the find to the flight of 1204 in the Loon War; that is his inference, unproven.
- Matthijs van Halteren, 2014. Benedictus Sanctus Martinus Sanctus; source not given.
- Wagner et al., 2009 and 2013. The SDX-family expansions used above; the family readings are tentative.
- Craig Peters, 2011. BENEDICE with interrupting characters; the OXO possibly symbolic.
05 What would finish it
not solved The formula-level parse is as far as the published material goes.
| what | why it would work |
|---|---|
| The Restaura conservation report and the Provincial Depot photographs | They would settle the doubtful letters (the sign printed as 7, the M and T ligatures) and show the abbreviation strokes. |
| An agreed expansion of the SDX, DIC and NED formulae | The unexplained groups are the family’s own formula parts; reading them on one blade would read them on the others. |
06 Sources
- Marc van Hasselt, “Een mysterieus zwaard uit Holland”, Madoc 28/2 (2014), pp. 115–123, PDF at Archeon.
- Thomas G. Wagner, John Worley, Anna Holst Blennow and Gunilla Beckholmen, “+INNOMINEDOMINI+ Medieval Christian invocation inscriptions on sword blades”, Waffen- und Kostümkunde 51 (2009), pp. 11–52, DiVA.
- Thomas G. Wagner, “How to make swords talk”, Waffen- und Kostümkunde 55 (2013), pp. 113–132, DiVA.
- myArmoury thread on the blade (Peters 2011; van Halteren 2014).
The River Witham sword (write-up) carries similar lettering. Notes and profile are in targets/alphen1200/ in the project repository.
Cite this page
Daniel Bourdeau, “The Alphen aan den Rijn sword inscription”, Cyphersolver, posted 9 November 2026, https://cyphersolver.com/alphen1200.html.