Today on History's Mysteries...

Is there anything cooler than the Voynich Manuscript? I don't think so. It's a fifteenth- or sixteenth-century MS, author unknown, written in an unidentifiable language or code, with an unidentifiable alphabet. It seems to be addressing common medieval topics, like herbology and alchemy and astrology, except no one can recognize any of the plants, it doesn't use the universal alchemical symbols, and the star charts are mostly indecipherable.

The easiest solution would be to dismiss it as a hoax, except if so it's WAY more elaborate than all the other hoaxes of the time. Also, statistical analysis of characters/words show similar patterns to natural languages, way more than you'd find if it was made-up nonsense. If it's a code, it's been unbreakable for the past one hundred years.

XKCD has a theory, of course, but looking at the script...


That's not a translation, just the transcription used to put it in the Latin alphabet.

...I think the most likely explanation is that Tolkien found a time machine and decided to dick with all of us.