Black light puts new faces to history

The story seems as if it were pulled straight from the script of the movie National Treasure: a priceless old book, hidden messages, and a young American who pieces it all together.

Instead of hidden passages and forgotten fortunes, however, a Cambridge graduate student’s discovery has shed new light on legends from the days of King Arthur, and unearthed a few ghosts in the process.

It’s an eerie tale of technology and literature that begins in a reading room.

Myriah Williams is a 28- year- old graduate student at the University of Cambridge. Three years ago she moved from California to Cambridge to study something called The Black Book of Carmarthen. The small volume roughly dates to the year 1250, making it one of the oldest surviving medieval manuscripts written solely in Welsh.

Written on vellum, or animal skin, The Black Book appears to be the work of a single scribe, likely a monk. It’s a mixture of poetry and prose, Williams says, with several passages that feature King Arthur and others that include Merlin, the legendary wizard. The Black Book also contains annotations from later readers, added lovingly over the centuries.

But Williams and her supervisor, Professor Paul Russell from Cambridge’s Department of Anglo- Saxon, Norse and Celtic studies, also found that some of The Black Book’s annotations had been erased over nearly eight centuries. So the academic duo decided to subject the priceless medieval manuscript to a very modern invention: a black light.

Under UV rays, two pairs of eyes suddenly shone from the ancient pages. The eyes belonged to two men, drawn in detail in the bottom margin of a page. Near them was an inscription, also previously hidden. It read: “love and affection to my most honourable kinsmen.”

“We never expected to encounter any images and then to have these faces looking back at us, we were both like: ‘ Are you seeing what I’m seeing? Is that really there?’? Williams says. “So that was very exciting.”

Her hunch is that one of The Black Book’s many owners left the inscription and drew the portraits of his kinsmen before giving them the book.

Without the black light, their faces never would have been seen again. The drawings were a particular surprise, she says, because “images are quite rare in medieval Welsh manuscripts.”

Williams and Russell also found another entire page of hidden text, but the medieval Welsh writing was nearly illegible and the pair is still working on transcribing it.