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A strange man in a bow tie with a serious comb-over left you this:
"A simple cipher," he says, "and I leave it to you to find out what has been lost." Can you?
On an OOC note, I have no idea how hard this would be…? Also, sorry for the bad image quality.
Plaintext:
We knew that land once, You and I,
and once we wandered there
in the long days now long gone by,
a dark child and a fair.
Was it on the paths of firelight thought
in winter cold and white,
or in the blue-spun twilit hours
of little early tucked-up beds
in drowsy summer night,
that you and I in Sleep went down
to meet each other there,
your dark hair on your white nightgown
and mine was tangled fair?
- J. R. R. Tolkien, The Little House of Lost Play: Mar Vanwa Tyalieva
Solve path:
The word separators were the biggest clue. I began by highlighting all of the repeated words. The separators also told me the very first word could not be a one-letter word, or else there are too many unique one-letter words (and I'm already expecting one extra for
the). This tells me the horizontal line is a separate letter. There aren't many two-letter words I expect to find at the beginning of a sentence, mostlyIF,NO, orWE. The most frequent three-letter word is eitherTHEorAND. After assumingWEandAND, the second repetition ofWEwas right next to a long word beginning withWand containing a few ofNDE. A pattern search turned up the wordWANDERED, which confirmed that the horizontal stroke across the letter meant a letterEfollowed that letter, and likewise the curve below meansA. Then, a word followingWEand ending inWhas to beKNEW. I continued solving it as a simple substitution and learned that the vowels have whole-symbol forms (in addition to the combining forms) for when they appear at the beginning of a word, and in other places.
By the time I completed the line
in the long days now long gone by, I decided to google it and found the source. So I only discovered the "double letter" combining symbol after the fact.
The only tools I used were the drawing program Inkscape, and a small program I wrote for finding dictionary words according to various patterns.
Z- AT-Z (R_N) D_TOETJ-, B|C STO LY,
STO ETF Z- Z_TO-Z-O (R-Z)F
LT G D|TV O_BQ T|Z D|TV V|T- KB
S O_ZA JR*DO STO S W_LZ
Z_Q L() ET GU_(RQ) EW W*Z-D*VR()
LT Z*T(FZ) J|DO STO ZR*(F),
@Z LT (R-) T D.F QU.T (Z*D*)() R|CZQ
EW F_ZDB (CJ)A-O CUK-OQ
LT OZ|ZQB Q.H~FZ T*VR()
(B_D) B|C STO LY LT QDF~U Z-T() O|ZT
(E) UF~() F_JR E(R-Z) (R-Z-),
B|CZ O_ZA R_LZ ET B|CZ ZR*(F) T*VR(V|Z)T
STO H*T- Z_Q (ST)VD-O W_LZ?
Key:
A: weird curly AB: beak pointing northeastC: curly spiralD: deltaE: @F: flowerG: γH: horseshoeJ: curly J (maybe a cursive T?)K: ampersandL: weird lambdaN: dome characterO: circleQ: double circleR: manta ray-ish shape (ginkgo leaf, maybe?)S: integral signT: treble clefU: backward ampersandV: spark on top of Aries symbolW: wavesZ: zigzaggy 3-: bar through previous symbol_: cup under previous symbol~: tilde over previous symbol*: asterisk over previous symbol|: vertical bar through previous symbol.: dot under previous symbol(): dome over enclosed symbolsOut of curiosity, I tried to extract the text from the back of the papers, in case there's a clue. The pictures are pretty noisy (probably a cell phone camera) so it's difficult, here's the best I could do:
It appears to be a letter of some sort. I can read the date (January or February 28, 2016) on the top of the first page; I can see a fragment "-ing our" at the end of the third or fourth line on the same page; and I can see a signature in the middle of the second page.
