Sometime in 1153 or 1154, the German nun Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) wrote a letter to the elderly Pope Anastasius IV (1073-1154). Her words were scathing. She called the pope tired and criticized his rule, describing him as too accepting of depraved people and urging him to control the arrogance of those around him. There was corruption in the medieval church, Hildegard asserted, and he, as pope, should be doing something about it.
Hildegard did not hold back her anger; but among her many complaints, she included an unusual throw-away comment – a reference to one of the greatest mysteries of her life: she told Anastasius that she had witnessed a miracle, an experience that led her to create Unknown Letters and to speak an Unknown Language (lingua ignota and litterae ignotae in Latin). These mysterious creations remain little understood today, and scholars continue to debate their purpose.
Hildegard of Bingen
Hildegard of Bingen was one of the greatest thinkers of the Middle Ages and is best known today for her beautiful musical compositions and visionary writings. Born as the tenth child of a wealthy family in 1098, probably in Bermersheim in western Germany, at around the age of 14, her parents sent her to become an anchoress, or religious recluse, at the monastery of Disibodenberg. Once installed within the monastery's tiny convent, she probably expected to experience little else for the rest of her life. But 24 years later, in 1136, the nuns elected her to lead their growing convent. Hildegard immediately reduced her predecessor's austere rules, and more surprisingly, began her rise to fame.
Throughout her life, Hildegard had experienced visions. She had kept these secret from everyone she had met since childhood, except for Jutta of Sponheim (circa 1092-1136) – her predecessor as head nun of Disibodenberg – and a monk named Volmar (died 1173). Now, at the age of 42, she saw a great light descend from the sky and enter her heart and mind. Suddenly, she could better understand the Bible and the writings of saints, and a voice told her to write down everything that she had seen and heard in her visions. Although this thought terrified her, she did as the voice had asked and began to write a book detailing her experiences. This would be known as Scivias and took her ten years to complete. During this time, her work came to the attention of Pope Eugene III (1088-1153), who read a portion of this masterpiece and gave Hildegard his papal seal of approval to continue writing.
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It was between 1150 and 1158 – with Scivias complete and while managing a newly rebuilt convent at Rupertsberg – that Hildegard developed her Unknown Language and Unknown Letters. This was a new phase in her life, in which she turned her attention to investigating the world around her. In her book Physica, she wrote about nature, from plants and reptiles to metals and minerals, while in Causae et curae, she explored the structure of the cosmos. With such investigations on her mind, she invented her mysterious words and symbols.
Hildegard's Unknown Language – the lingua ignota – consists of 1,011 nouns. These are arranged from the most divine to everything below and cover a wide range of topics, from parts of the human body, skin diseases, and the months of the year, to church architecture, plants, and insects. God, as the most important being in the cosmic hierarchy, is listed first, under the word "Aigonz", while the devil is "Diuueliz". Bees are "Sapiduz"; garlic is "Clarischil"; and there is even a word for beer mug: "Gunguliz". A foot is "Fuscal", and an arm is "Branizel". Despite the extensive nature of this list, it appears to be only a selection of Hildegard's created words. The only known example of her using her Unknown Language in daily life is in her song, "O Orzchis Ecclesia", which was perhaps performed at the consecration of a church, and includes words that are absent from her surviving word lists.
The Unknown Letters (litterae ignotae), meanwhile, consist of 23 symbols, each standing for a letter of the alphabet (j, v, and w are not included). There are also symbols for "et" and "est", which are based on a Latin shorthand system called Tironian Notes. Hildegard's inspirations for her letter designs are hard to pinpoint, but they share similarities to Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic, with some resemblance to a script that is later called "Theban Writing". As with the Unknown Language, there are only a couple of surviving examples of Hildegard using her symbols in practice. The earliest case is found in a letter that Hildegard wrote to the monks of Zwiefalten in south-west Germany, composed between 1153 and 1154. She used her invented script to spell out the letter's recipients – the monks – perhaps because her content is critical of them and she wanted to hide their identity from prying eyes. In a second letter, Hildegard's script is written in the margin, seemingly addressing a bishop. Again, why she used her Unknown Letters is hard to explain. As they came to Hildegard in a divine vision – effectively from God – it is possible that their presence gave her words extra authority.
Function?
Scholars still debate why Hildegard created her Unknown Language and Unknown Letters, and over the years have made different arguments for how she used them. It has been suggested that Hildegard believed her Unknown Language to be the words spoken by virgins in heaven, or that she was speaking in tongues, or perhaps that it was the language of Adam – the original language of creation at the beginning of time. Another explanation is that her language and script were a form of secret communication between Hildegard and her nuns, ensuring that outsiders could not understand them. An extra suggestion is that Hildegard created her language as "ornamentation" for her poetry. Writers often used Greek in their poetry to highlight their learning, but Hildegard could not speak this language. Consequently, the presence of her Unknown Language in her songs might have emphasised her special connection to the divine.
Whatever the case may be, it is clear that the Unknown Language and Unknown Letters were not a secret. In addition to Hildegard mentioning them in her letter to Pope Anastasius, described above, she also writes of their existence in the preface to her work Liber vitae meritorum in 1163, where again, they are described as having come to her in a vision.
Inspirations
As her inspiration for these creations, Hildegard appears to have drawn from summaria, dictionary-like works that provided readers with similar thematic word lists to her Unknown Language. In particular, the Summarium Heinrici was popular in 12th-century Germany, and she appears to have read Raban Maur's De inventione linguarum, which presents assorted alphabets and secret writing systems.
Although Hildegard was unusual for her time in creating her own language and script, medieval scribes did enjoy experimenting with different alphabets, often to write their names in the manuscripts they copied – they believed this added beauty to their pages, and it ensured that readers understood that these personal additions were not part of the main text. Greek letters were a popular choice for this, but scribes also used runes and even invented scripts. The most popular secret writing systems were Notae Bonifatii, in which the scribe replaced vowels with different numbers of dots, and the Caesar Cipher, in which each letter was replaced by the one immediately following it – "a" becoming "b", for example. The word "Caesar" would therefore be transformed into "Dbftbs".
The Fate of Hildegard's Writings
Around 1170, when Hildegard was nearing the end of her life, the monk Volmar lamented that when she passes, the knowledge of her Unknown Language will vanish with her – who will speak it, he asked. Volmar died in 1173, and Hildegard, six years later, in 1179, at the age of 81. Despite Volmar's fears, scribes included copies of the Unknown Language and Unknown Letters in three compilations of Hildegard's writings, improving their chances of survival. One of these manuscripts ultimately ended up in the Austrian National Library in Vienna but vanished sometime between 1800 and 1830. A second manuscript, dated to 1220, passed through multiple hands, including that of Kaiser Wilhelm II, the German emperor and king of Prussia during the First World War (1914-18), and entered the Berlin State Library collection in 1912.
Perhaps the most impressive manuscript to preserve the Unknown Letters and Unknown Language is the Riesencodex, or "Giant Codex", so-named because it weighs a massive 15 kg (33 lb). This extensive compilation of Hildegard's writings was probably produced during the 12th century and originally held at Rupertsberg Monastery. The Riesencodex survived the destruction of this monastery during the Thirty Years' War in 1632, and centuries later, during the Second World War, it also managed to survive the bombing of Dresden in 1945, where it had been kept in a custom-made metal box, locked in a bank vault. Although the bank was destroyed, and looters stole other manuscripts from the vault, the Riesencodex remained. In 1948, the manuscript was smuggled out of Soviet hands, and since 1949, it has been kept safely in Wiesbaden, Germany.
