A mistake in the VM?

One of the notable things about the VM is that there are no obvious mistakes. The scribe(s) do not appear to have erased, scraped out or overlined any text.

On f105r, however, there are four words written in an odd location, and I will argue that these were accidentally omitted from the end of the first line of the text, but the mistake was caught before the scribe was done and they were written in above the line. These words make up line 10 in the Landini-Stolfi transliteration, and fall between the second paragraph and the third one.

On René Zandbergen's site the description for this page has the following note: "There is a break between the third and fourth paragraph, and it appears as if the end of the third paragraphs was written above it." I think the "break" referred to here is the fact that the ink of the fourth paragraph is slightly fainter than the third, and the letters are neater and smaller, suggesting that paragraphs 1-3 were written in one sitting, and paragraphs 4 and onward were written later.

Observations

We can observe the following things about the physical appearance of these words:

• They are set lower than the last line of the second paragraph, though there was ample space to place them in line with it, suggesting that they are not intended to be part of paragraph 2.
• The gallows letters of the first line of the third paragraph are interposed between the oddball words, suggesting that the oddball words were written after the first line of paragraph 3 was completed, and written around the gallows letters.
• The color and shape of the letters in these words is similar to those in paragraphs 1-3, so not obviously written later or in a different hand.

The words have the following statistical properties:

• sairy elsewhere only appears as the last word of the first line of a paragraph
• ore does not appear elsewhere
• daiindy appears once in Currier A as part of a label and twice in Currier B (including this instance), not in either case as the end of a line
• ytam appears both in Currier A and B, usually at the end of the line, but not always

Conclusions

The color and style of the letters, together with their placement, suggest that they belong to paragraph 3, and they were written in at roughly the same time that the other lines of paragraph 3 were written. The statistical properties of the words suggest that they belong to the end of a line, but which line?

• Line 11: This line ends in dyaiin, which is a word not found elsewhere
• Line 12: This line ends in ry, which elsewhere is only a line-final word
• Line 13: This line ends with ot, which elsewhere does not appear at the end of a line. There is blank space at the end of the paragraph, sufficient to write about two words.

Given that line 12 ends in a word which is elsewhere only line-final, and line 13 leaves enough space for at least two of the oddball words to have been written there, the best explanation is that these words belong at the end of line 11, the line immediately below them.

I have seen omissions like this in manuscripts in the past, and the cause is often that the eye skips from one word to a later similar word. In this case, perhaps the scribe's eye skipped from sairy to yaiir, which starts line 12. That opens up two possibilities:

• If the text was enciphered first on a wax tablet (or something similar) and then copied to the vellum, and the eye-skip occurred during the copying process, then line-breaks on the wax tablet were not the same as the line breaks on the vellum.
• If the eye-skip occurred during the encipherment process, then the plaintext for sairy could be similar to (or even identical to) the plaintext for yaiir.