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In an earlier article on this and other platforms, I reported on the recent sale, by the auction house Sotheby’s, of an ice axe dating from the 1920s. It was claimed, I think credibly, that the axe had belonged to George Mallory; that he had left it with his sister Mary before setting out the 1924 expedition to Everest; and that he had probably used it on Mount Everest in 1921 or 1922.

I advanced the hypothesis that, if this axe had indeed been one of Mallory’s, then the axe which Wyn Harris found in 1933 was not Mallory’s – at least, not one of Mallory’s personal axes. It was much shorter than the Sotheby’s axe; and I imagine that at least for climbing Everest, Mallory had a preference for an axe of a certain length.

For the same reason, I argued that the 1933 axe was not one of Irvine’s personal axes.

Why Mallory or Irvine should have been carrying an unusually short axe remains a mystery. To my mind, why they discarded it is less of a mystery. I find it easy to believe that each of them had his personal axe, and that the short axe was a spare, and eventually an encumbrance.

Be that as it may: my interest here is to reflect on how the 1933 axe became part of the mythology of Mallory’s and Irvine’s demise.

In the immediate aftermath of the disappearance of Mallory and Irvine, two narratives competed for the ear of the British public. First off the mark was Noel Odell, who wrote in “Everest Dispatches No.9”, datelined June 14, 1924 and published in The Times of London on July 5, 1924:

>“… [I] consider it very probable that they sheltered in some rock recess and fell asleep, and a painless death followed, due to the excessive cold at those altitudes.”

Edward Norton, as pro tem leader of the expedition, had delegated the story of Mallory and Irvine to Odell; but he must not have paid much attention to what Odell had written. Afterwards, he was distressed by Odell’s narrative. On June 28 he wrote to Sydney Spencer, secretary of the Alpine Club:

>“I am very sorry Odell put in that bit about their dying of exposure in his communiqué; he is the only member of the party who holds that view. All the rest of us are agreed that it is any odds on a ‘fall off’.”

and on July 6 he wrote to Francis Younghusband, president of the Royal Geographical Society:

>“In spite of what Odell put in his account[,] the rest of us [expedition members] are unanimous in ascribing the accident to a “fall off” – as it seems incredible to us that they could have lost their way & died of exposure. For the sake of their relatives[,] I am anxious that the other idea should not become current.”

In fact, nothing was known about the manner of Mallory’s and Irvine’s deaths. I do not know why Norton should have thought Odell’s account incredible; nor why that account should be painful to the families; nor why he wanted the narrative of a fall to prevail; nor, if he did, why he did not supervise or edit Odell’s account before it was sent to The Times.

However, “Everest Dispatches No.9” was published in The Geographical Journal of August 1924; Odell’s story appeared in full. I have seen nothing to suggest that Norton, in the public domain, sought to challenge Odell. It seems to me that, for the moment, Odell’s narrative prevailed.

In December 1924, The Geographical Journal published Odell’s article “The Last Climb of Mallory and Irvine”. Therein, Odell outlined the arguments for his own interpretation, and implicitly, that of Norton, but without mentioning Norton:

>“… they may have missed the way and failed to find Camp VI., and in their overwrought condition sought shelter till daylight … sleep at that altitude and in that degree of cold would almost certainly prove fatal.

>… The other possibility is that they met their death by falling. This implies that they were roped together, which need not be inferred from their observed movements when last seen. … But could such a pair fall, and where technically the climbing appeared so easy?

>… It has been suggested that the oxygen apparatus failed and thereby rendered them powerless to return. I cannot believe this …

>… Hence I incline to the view first expressed, that they met their death by being benighted.”

In short, Odell doubled down on his narrative: Mallory and Irvine had died of exposure.

The 1933 ice axe

There, it seems to me, the matter rested – until May 30, 1933 when Percy Wyn Harris found the ice axe. At this point, the narrative of a fall took on new life.

A frame from the film The Fourth Everest Expedition, at 57m28s. The First Step is at center; the summit pyramid is at center-right. Wyn Harris probably found the ice axe near this spot. Image credit: (probably) Percy Wyn Harris, by courtesy of British Film Institute.

Hugh Ruttledge, leader of the 1933 expedition, wrote in Everest 1933:

>“… it seems probable that the axe marked the scene of a fatal accident. … either that it was accidentally dropped when a slip occurred or that its owner put it down possibly in order to have both hands free to hold the rope.”

Wyn Harris, writing in 1978 in his unpublished memoirs, would take the same view:

>“To me the axe had only one explanation. It marked the scene of a fall by a climber either from the ridge 60 feet above or from the place where the axe was lying.”

Frank Smythe, in his book Camp Six, echoed the narrative of a fall, and added a scenario drawn entirely from his imagination, and unsupported by any evidence:

>“The most tenable theory is that the axe marks the scene of a slip. The climbing is easy at this point, yet once a climber slips he would be unlikely to stop himself. … They were traversing the slabs, in preference to the broken and probably more fatiguing crest of the north-east ridge, when one of them slipped. The other instinctively dropped or put his ice axe down and seized the rope in both hands in an endeavour to check the fall of his companion. He failed and was pulled off by the rope.”

Ruttledge, Wyn Harris and Smythe all chose to ignore an egregious objection to their stories. Harris found the ice axe on smooth slabs of rock. Smythe affirmed that the slabs were inclined at an angle of 30 to 40 degrees to the horizontal. On such terrain, an ice axe would not readily stay in place. Whether dropped, or put down in haste, it would continue down the mountain.

Yet their narrative, and especially Smythe’s colourful elaboration, it seems to me, became central to the legend of Mallory and Irvine.

I think that it was in the 1960s that the narrative acquired another dimension: to the effect that, specifically, the axe had been Irvine’s. The earliest trace that I have found of this new dimension is a letter which Alexander S Irvine, Andrew Irvine’s brother, wrote to the Daily Telegraph, and which was published on April 17, 1969:

>“ … the marks on the ice-axe found by Wyn Harris were very similar to marks cut on a swagger-cane, a relic of my brother’s days in the O T C [Officer Training Corps] at Shrewsbury. Some years ago Noel Odell carried the swagger-cane off for comparison with the ice-axe …”

Whether Odell ever did that comparison, I have been unable to determine. However, like the story of the fall, the narrative of “Irvine’s axe” also passed into the legend.

Regarding the marks on the ice axe: I have viewed the axe at the Alpine Club, and indeed it has notches or grooves in various places. However, Wyn Harris had another take on the marks. On June 16, 1934 he wrote to Odell:

>“The triple III was on the axe when I picked it up. At least I noticed them when I got to camp 3 but the X was not there. The X was put on by ‘Pugla’ my servant, who had an unfortunate habit of marking everything he looked after. … I imagine he put them on to identify my property.

>… the triple III was a porters mark – either to mark his own axe or to mark his master’s. I believe the axe is one of the property axes of the expedition as Mallory certainly wouldn’t have bought so ill balanced an axe – at least it appeared ill balanced to me - & Irvine if he had a private axe would possibly have bought it at Beale’s. Don’t you think it probable that it was a porter’s axe borrowed by one of them – I used a porter’s axe myself.”

But Wyn Harris’ interpretation never made it into the legend of Mallory and Irvine.

The contour lines

To my mind, there is one physical fact that rules out the narrative of a fall.

A party of American climbers found Mallory’s body on May 1, 1999. He was in the northeast corner of a concave terrain on the North Face, which has come to be known as the “Mallory basin”. He was approximately 3,600 feet horizontally from the summit, at an altitude of about 26,900 feet.

The spot where Wyn Harris found the ice axe is not known with any precision. It was variously put at 200 or 250 yards east of the First Step, and 60 feet below the crest of the Northeast Ridge. East must mean northeast, parallel with the Northeast Ridge; and the First Step must mean the crest, which is distinctive, which the base is not.

Mount Everest has not changed its shape since 1933. The contour lines today are as they were. They can be found on some published maps, and they can be visualised in applications such as Christoph Hofstetter’s Contour Map Creator. An object falling from anywhere on the mountain will descend on a trajectory approximately perpendicular to the contour lines. We can allow for bounces and ricochets, but I think that the effect would be no more than a few metres along the contour lines.

As I wrote in Mallory, Irvine and Everest: The Last Step But One (Pen And Sword, 2024), an object falling from the ice axe spot would not arrive at the place where Mallory’s body was found. That is true for either of the reported locations of the axe. It would miss Mallory’s resting place by the best part of 100 metres.

Finally: to the best of my knowledge, only one medical professional has ever commented on Mallory’s injuries. He was the coroner of King County in Washington State. He could not have seen Mallory’s body, but I presume that he saw photographs. He told the mountaineer Jake Norton that Mallory had been alive when he arrived at the place where he died.

The two reported locations of the 1933 ice axe; the respective fall lines (perpendicular to the contour lines); and the approximate location of Mallory’s body. Base image © CNES / Airbus by courtesy of Google Earth; additional graphics and legend by author; location of Mallory’s body by courtesy of Jake Norton.

On July 9, 2026, the auction house Sotheby’s sold an ice axe, claimed to have belonged to George Mallory. Sotheby's were careful to qualify the sale with the statement that there is no ice axe that can definitively be shown to be Mallory’s.

According to Sotheby’s, this ice axe had been in the possession of Mallory’s sister Mary Henrietta Brooke. Mrs Brooke passed away in 1983; I presume that her family placed the axe with Sotheby’s. The auction announcement states that, according to Mrs Brooke, it was Mallory’s ice axe and that he left it with her before leaving England for the 1924 expedition to Mount Everest.

Sotheby’s added the following comment:

>“The ice axe bears obvious signs of wear so it is likely, but not certain, that it was used on his earlier attempts on Everest in 1921-22.”

The winning bid was £38,900.

Sotheby's published the following description of the axe:

>"“Edelweiss” ice axe, steel head (length 29 cm) with serrated pick (18cm) and adze (11cm), with wooden shaft (length 103.5cm) and pointed spike on ferrule, head stamped (“FUHRER F[RER]ES | GSTAAD”, “[S]CHWEI[ZER] PICKEL”, with Edelweiss device), with extensive markings from use."

From the image published on Sotheby’s website I have calculated that, including the spike, the length of the axe is 107.8 cm.

Ice axe sold by Sotheby's on Jul 9, 2026, Lot 72. Base image by courtesy of Sotheby's; additional graphics and legend by author.

By comparison, the Alpine Club in London has an ice axe which Percy Wyn Harris found in 1933 on Mount Everest. The spot where Harris found it was variously reported as 200 or 250 yards northeast of the First Step; the corresponding altitude is about 27,700 feet. The axe has been attributed to Mallory or Irvine. Indeed, either Mallory or Irvine must have placed the axe where Harris found it; only they could have been there prior to 1933.

I viewed this axe at the library of the Alpine Club. The librarian measured it at my request. It is 95 cm long including the spike.

Ice axe at the Alpine Club, London, found by Percy Wyn Harris on May 30, 1933. Image by courtesy of the Alpine Club; additional graphics and legend by author.

If the axe sold by Sotheby’s is indeed one of Mallory’s, and if he had used it on the 1921 or 1922 expedition, then the axe at the Alpine Club cannot have been a personal axe of Mallory. It is about 13 cm too short.

Nor can it be a personal axe of Irvine, who was at least three inches taller than Mallory. Shrewsbury School in England, where Irvine studied, has one of Irvine's axes. The staff measured it at my request; the handle is 110 cm long.

The axe at the Alpine Club is of the right length to have been a communal axe of the expedition: possibly intended primarily for use by porters. But no porters accompanied Mallory and Irvine on their last climb.

To mark the 102nd anniversary of the last climb of George Mallory and Andrew Irvine, I submitted the manuscript of my new book "Irvine's Story".

The publisher is Pen And Sword. Publication in 2027?

Author's concepts for the jacket of \"Irvine's Story\"

The first nine lines of Canto 1 of La Divina Commedia, in the Foligno edition of 1472.

In previous articles on this platform, I have advanced the hypothesis that the scribes who wrote the text of the Voynich manuscript could have worked in a two-stage process, as follows:

• transcribing letters in the source documents to glyphs, word by word, according to a mapping prescribed by the producer;
• within each transcribed “word”, re-ordering the glyphs according to a “slot alphabet”, also prescribed by the producer.

I gave an example, drawn from Dante Alighieri’s La Divina Commedia, in which I applied such a process to a line of Italian text. This yielded a sequence of glyph strings in which the majority were real Voynich “words”.

In advancing this hypothesis, I have proposed that the re-ordering had to follow the transcription, and not precede it. My assumption is that the producer wanted the manuscript to be readable, but only by readers who possessed the mapping.

If the re-ordering preceded the transcription, the scribe would have to follow some systematic sequence that was applicable to the source language. We could think of this sequence as an alphabet. It could be the accepted alphabet of that language (which from the producer's viewpoint, would be the simplest instruction). In any case, the leftmost letters in each word would be among the first letters in that alphabet.

For example, the first line of La Divina Commedia, if the words are spelled as in the fifteenth century and written in full, is:

>

Let us suppose that the producer instructed a scribe to sort the letters in each word according to the Latin alphabet, retaining the case sensitivity. Thereby the line became:

>

The scribe then mapped this re-ordered text to glyphs.

Whatever the mapping from letters to glyphs might be, a reader might guess that in the fourth, sixth and seventh “words”, the leftmost glyph represented an “a”. Other glyphs might well follow, and the mapping would be cracked.

On the other hand, suppose that the producer gave the scribes a “slot alphabet” of his or her own devising, to be applied to the transcribed strings of glyphs. In this case, the ordinary reader could not guess the letters that the glyphs represented. The meaning of the manuscript would then be accessible only to the privileged possessors of the key. If that key were lost, the manuscript would become unreadable, and for, let us say, six hundred years, would remain so.

Mapping recurring letters

The reasonable question may be raised as to what the scribe would do when transcribing words in which a letter recurs – either as a doubled letter, or as a recurrence elsewhere in the word.

Again we may draw an example from La Divina Commedia, where in the 1472 edition, on the third line, we see the word “diricta” with two “i”s, and “smarrita” with two “a”s and a doubled “r”. If a scribe maps this line to a sequence of glyphs, and if the mapping is one-to-one, and if the glyphs are then re-ordered, then the two “i”s, the two “a”s and the two “r”s will each become a doubled glyph.

The question then becomes: does the Voynich manuscript contain enough doubled glyphs to represent letters that recur within words?

This is an empirical question. Our first step is to determine how often there are instances of recurring letters within words in natural languages. No doubt, the frequency of this phenomenon differs from one language to another. I have started, as is my wont, with medieval Italian as represented by La Divina Commedia.

One easy way to count letter recurrences is to take the text and run it through an online letter sorting application such as  https://onlinetexttools.com/sort-letters-in-words. This process can be done with case-sensitivity (as I have done), or without. This results in a new text in which, for example, the first nine lines of La Divina Commedia in the 1472 edition are re-ordered as follows:

original	letters sorted within words
Nel mezo del camin dinrã uita	Nel emoz del acimn dinrã aitu
mi trouai puna selua oscura,	im aiortu anpu aelsu acorsu,
che la diriπa uia era smarrita.	ceh al adiirπ aiu aer aaimrrst.
Et quanto a dir q”lera e cosa dura	Et anoqtu a dir q”aelr e acos adru
esta selua seluagia e aspra e forte	aest aelsu aaegilsu e aaprs e efort
che nel pensier rinoua la paura!	ceh eln eeinprs ainoru al aapru!
Tant e amara che pocho e piu morte;	Tant e aaamr ceh choop e ipu emort;
ma p traπar del ben ch i ui trouai,	am p aarrtπ del ben ch i iu aiortu,
diro de l altre cose ch i u ho scorte.	dior de l aelrt ceos ch i u ho ceorst.

The next step is to count, in the re-ordered text, the occurrences of bigrams such as “aa” or trigrams such as “aaa”, using for example the “find” function in Microsoft Word. We can then identify the letters that recur within words, and how often they recur. In La Divina Commedia, the most common such letters are listed below.

Counts of doubled or tripled letters in La Divina Commedia, after alphabetic sorting of letters within words. Totals refer to all recurring letters, including those not listed in this extract.

From this exercise we see that of the 396,445 letters in La Divina Commedia, 76,932 letters (or 19.4 percent of the total) are letters which occur at least twice within a single word. These include 7,671 letters (or 1.9 percent) which occur three times or more within a single word.

We can now turn to the Voynich manuscript, and investigate whether its glyph counts can replicate this phenomenon.

v101

Of the conventional transliterations of the Voynich manuscript, Glen Claston’s v101 is my favorite, for its minimalist assumptions. In v101, there is a total of 158,940 glyphs by Claston’s definitions. Very few glyphs are explicitly doubled. There is only one that occurs as a double more than 100 times, and that is {c}; the string {cc} occurs 1,686 times. If we count all explicit occurrences of double or triple glyphs, they account for only 3,612 glyphs, or 2.3 percent of the total glyph count.

We are entitled then to ask whether the Voynich manuscript, thus defined, can account for recurring letters in natural languages.

I think that the way forward is to reassess Claston’s definitions of glyphs. I believe that Claston himself, in designating his transliteration as v101, intended and expected that other researchers would explore alternative definitions. Thereby they would create new transliterations, which they might number v102, v103 and so on.

To my mind, there are at least twenty v101 glyphs that invite redefinition. One of the most egregious examples is {m}, which occurs 4,112 times in the manuscript. The glyph {m} could be interpreted as a sting of three glyphs {iiN} (as in the EVA transliteration); this string contains the doubled glyph {ii}. In that case, here alone we have 4,112 instances of a doubled glyph.

And there are some common glyphs, notably {1}, {2} and the variants of {2}, which have a bifurcate structure and look like they might represent doubled or recurring letters in the presumed precursor languages.

Below is a selection of common v101 glyphs which look as if they could be redefined to represent or contain doubled glyphs.

Author’s subjective selection of glyphs which have the visual appearance of representing or containing doubled or tripled glyphs. Author's analysis, based on v101 transliteration. Frequency is calculated as count of glyphs, divided by total glyph count. Totals include some additional glyphs not listed in this table.

If we redefine all of the glyphs listed in this table, the total glyph count of the manuscript increases to 184,676; and we have a count of 50,928 glyphs which are components of doubles or triples – equivalent to 27.6 percent of the total glyph count.

Purely on a raw glyph count, we can create a new transliteration in which the number of doubled and tripled glyphs is more than sufficient to account for recurring letters in medieval Italian.

Nevertheless, there must be more complexity in the mapping of recurring letters. The Voynich glyphs, if suitably redefined, allow us to find doubles and triples of {c} and {i), and possibly of some component of {1}. Italian, on the other hand, has four vowels that pervasively recur within words - namely a, e, i and o. This is largely a consequence of the gender and number endings of Italian nouns. Several Italian consonants - notably n, s, r and c - are often doubled, even in the fifteenth-century spelling which had less doubled letters than modern Italian.

It may follow that Italian is unlikely to be a substrate language of the Voynich manuscript.

As a counter-example, in medieval Arabic as represented by مقدمة (muqaddimah, or "Introduction") of Ibn Khaldun, written in 1377, letters which recur within words account for just 13.6 percent of the total letter count. In part, this is due to the absence of doubled letters in Arabic. A consonant which is to be pronounced as doubled can be marked with the ّ (shaddah), as in مُقَدِّـمَـة, but in practice the ّ is often omitted.

In Arabic, two letters in particular are prone to recur: ا (alef) and ل (lam). We might be encouraged to look for correspondences with the Voynich doubled glyphs {ii} and {cc}, on a suitable redefinition of the glyphs. As I mentioned in an earlier article on this platform, Arabic is one of the most encouraging languages in terms of mapping the top ten Voynich "words" to real words.

In any case, we need to ask to what extent letters recur within words in other medieval languages. To answer this question, we would need to apply the process that I outlined above, to representative documents in those languages. This is not a difficult task, and will be the subject of a future article on this platform.

A scribe imagined, transcribing lines from Dante's \"La Divina Commedia2.

Here is an example of how I imagine the transcription of a medieval document, which resulted in the book that we now know as the Voynich manuscript.

Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that:

• a scribe receives Canto 1 of Dante Alighieri's La Divina Commedia, with instructions to transcribe it to the symbols that we now call Voynich glyphs;
• the principal glyphs are defined as Glen Claston will define them six hundred years later, with the exception that the symbol that Claston will call {4o} is not two glyphs but one;
• the Italian words are written in full, without the abbreviations and concatenations of the Foligno edition;
• the producer has prescribed a one-to-one mapping of Latin letters to glyphs, either not knowing or not caring that this mapping will preserve the frequencies of the Latin letters;
• it follows, with some confidence, that each Latin letter maps approximately to the equally ranked glyph; for example e to {o}, a to {9}, i to {a}, and so on.

In this scenario, the scribe examines the first line of Canto 1, which consists of seven words:

>nel mezo del camin di nostra uita

and following the mapping that the producer has laid down, he writes the rough transcription as shown below:

https://preview.redd.it/7j7o3pbgug0h1.png?width=806&format=png&auto=webp&s=6559a4035dc2dcc795c0fc2d7add6925c373f00a

He then refers to the producer’s “slot alphabet” for the correct order in which the glyphs must be written. We do not know whether this alphabet was simple or complex; nor whether it was rigid or flexible. We might guess that it embodied rules of the following nature:

• If the "word" contains the glyph {4o}, write that glyph in the leftmost position.
• If the "word" contains the glyph {m}, write that glyph in the rightmost position.
• If the "word" contains the glyph {9}, write that glyph in the rightmost position.
• The glyphs {c} and {C} can be to the right of, but not to the left of, the glyphs {h} and {k}.

The scribe's clean copy, which he writes on the vellum, is as shown below:

https://preview.redd.it/vqegga4kug0h1.png?width=806&format=png&auto=webp&s=05894d2f506245dd69db7e37a626c85d99c96db9

Five of these seven “words” are real “words” in the Voynich manuscript; and the other two "words" differ by only one glyph from real Voynich "words".

In practice, we have no reason to believe that the source documents included La Divina Commedia, or even that they were in medieval Italian. My working assumption is that they were in languages that were spoken and written in Europe in the fifteenth century.

However, this exercise demonstrates that a one-to-one mapping of letters to glyphs, coupled with some kind of re-ordering process, can replicate real Voynich "words".

I think that the way forward is to try many candidate languages, and many alternative transliterations of the Voynich manuscript, with all the permutations that this will involve. This is not a manual task; it will necessarily be a massive computational approach. It was just such an approach that cracked the Zodiac cipher.

https://preview.redd.it/acxvz07al90h1.png?width=2100&format=png&auto=webp&s=481d7d1b5f1e9bf718610db169ee3ffdb2cbbfcb

Here's an example of how I imagine a wealthy person, who lived in the fifteenth century, and whom I call the producer. I have imagined the producer as a man; equally, it could be a woman. The scene is a mansion or palace somewhere in southern Europe. The producer is giving instructions to a team of scribes.. Later, the scribes will write the text of the book that we now know as the Voynich manuscript.

As I imagine it, the producer engages at least five scribes. They are professional piece workers, paid by the page. The producer offers them a job which will keep them busy for at least several months, possibly more than a year.

The producer shows the scribes a set of symbols or glyphs that they have never seen before. It does not faze them; they are probably accustomed to writing in Latin or Greek script, possibly Arabic or Glagolitic.

He (or she) also provides a document, or a set of documents, containing some 40,000 words of text in a language and a script that they know. Perhaps he (or she) is the author; perhaps someone else is the author. They may even be well-known documents. It does not matter.

The task of the scribes will be to transcribe the source documents into the unknown alphabet. The producer sets out a set of rules and instructions for the transcription.

For this purpose, the producer will provide over one hundred sheets of calfskin vellum, already profusely illustrated on both recto and verso. The scribes will write the text, above, below and around the illustrations.

As I imagine, there is one specific instruction. Within each word, the scribes are first to map the letters to the glyphs, and then to re-order the glyphs in a sequence that the producer prescribes. This will create the phenomenon that, six centuries later, Mary D’Imperio will call "the five states", and Massimiliano Zattera will call "the slot alphabet".

If that is so, and if the producer intended the manuscript to be readable, he (or she) introduced an element of ambiguity into the decipherment. For example, the source documents might contain words that were anagrams of each other, like "trovai" and "travio" in Italian. Such words might map to the same string of glyphs.

Perhaps the producer expected that the reader, possessing or deducing the mapping between letters and glyphs, would infer the right meaning from the context. It would not be much harder than deciphering the following line:

* eln emoz acdeilmn ãdinr aitu

which readers of fifteenth-century Tuscan-Italian would intuit as:

* nel mezo delcamin dinrã uita,

or the first line of Dante Alighieri's La Divina Commedia, in the Foligno edition of 1472.