At a glanceNot solved · text not obtained
- The document
- A line of capital letters inlaid in gold wire along one face of a sword blade, between two crosses, with no word division.
- Where
- British Museum, museum number 1858,1116.5; found in 1825 in the River Witham near Lincoln and dated 1250–1330.
- The cipher
- Unknown. The vowel count (3 of 18) fits initials or abbreviations, which is not the same as showing it.
- How it was tried
- Letter counts, a search of the published proposals, and a check of the sibling inscribed blades for a key.
- Why it resists
- With eighteen letters and free abbreviation, many Latin, Germanic or Welsh phrases fit equally well, and the sibling blades are themselves unread.
- Credit
- Harald Winter’s initials reading is his own; it is recorded here, not tested or confirmed.
- Still open
- Everything. Photographs and the catalogue of inscribed swords would allow a comparison of the family.
01 The inscription
The letters, as published by the British Library (Julian Harrison, 11 August 2015) and by Winter (2016), are +NDXOXCHWDRGHDXORVI+: eighteen letters between two crosses, without spaces. No photograph of the blade was examined for this page; no image is reproduced here because none with a free licence was found.
| letter | count | letter | count |
|---|---|---|---|
| D | 3 | H | 2 |
| X | 3 | R | 2 |
| O | 2 | N, C, W, G, V, I | 1 each |
Three of the eighteen letters are vowels (O, O, I), about 17%; Latin running text has more, roughly 40% (a figure from general knowledge, not measured here). That fits an inscription made of initials or abbreviations. It does not say what the initials stand for, and W is not a Latin letter.
02 What has been proposed
- British Library, 2015. “As yet indecipherable”; perhaps a religious invocation; a Welsh sense was floated.
- Language Log and Cipher Mysteries threads, 2016. About twenty readings by commenters, among them Latin initials (Nomine Domini, Dominum Iesum Christum), a name for W, gematria, Hebrew and “Croats”. None can be checked.
- Harald Winter, Waffen- und Kostümkunde 58/2 (2016), revised 13 March 2026. Initials, with X read as CH(risti): N(omine) D(omini) X=CH(risti) / O(pe) X=CH(risti) CH(evalier) W / D(efendit) R(e)g(em) H(onorem) D(omini) X=CH(risti) OR(bos) VI(duas): “In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. With Christ’s help Sir W defends the king, the honour of God, orphans and widows.”
Winter’s reading is coherent and fits the period. Each expansion is still a choice made to fit: X is taken as CH where the same letter is also read as a cross or a spacer, W is a name, and “chevalier” sits inside Latin. Nothing in eighteen letters can confirm or reject it.
03 The sibling blades
Commenters name other blades with similar inlaid lettering: Alphen aan den Rijn in the Netherlands, one in Berlin and one in Sweden, sharing letter forms such as a curved X and an I-S ligature. The Alphen blade (BENEDOXO … MTINIUSCS) is itself only speculatively read (“Benedictus, Sanctus Martinus”), so it gives no key for the Witham letters. Wagner and Worley’s work on “talking swords” (2009, 2013) was not seen.
04 What would finish it
not solved The attempt is closed for lack of material.
| what | why it would work |
|---|---|
| Photographs of the Witham, Alphen, Berlin and Swedish blades | The letters could be transcribed and compared as one family, which tests whether a common formula repeats. |
| The Wagner and Worley catalogue of inscribed swords | A corpus of inscriptions with agreed readings would give the abbreviations a base to be tested against. |
05 Sources
- Julian Harrison, “Help us decipher this inscription”, British Library Medieval manuscripts blog, 11 August 2015, blog post.
- “NDXOXCHWDRGHDXORVI”, Language Log; and Cipher Mysteries, January 2016 (comments by Nick Pelling and others).
- Harald Winter, “Die Inschrift auf dem River Witham Sword entschlüsselt !?”, Waffen- und Kostümkunde 58/2 (2016), pp. 187–192c, doi 10.71475/wkk.2016.2.115248.
- myArmoury thread on the Alphen aan den Rijn blade.
Notes and profile are in targets/witham1250/ in the project repository.
Cite this page
Daniel Bourdeau, “The River Witham sword inscription”, Cyphersolver, posted 9 November 2026, https://cyphersolver.com/witham1250.html.