The Voynich Ninja

The only proposed ID for You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. I've seen so far was in a You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. by Diane arguing that it's some kind of banana. I'd like to know whether others share this opinion or if there are other possibilities.

In my opinion banana seems reasonable, and if it were so, the image would even be (relatively!) realistic. And naturalistic, without obvious symbolic elements.



The image especially seems to capture well how a banana plant is propagated. A mother plant will grow suckers (see image above), little plants that grow next to it on the same base (corm). These can then be separated and planted elsewhere as a new banana plant. Instructions on how to achieve the best results are that the sucker has to include a good amount of corm. The leaves and roots are often trimmed, as shown in the diagram below:




It was the following image which reminded me of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and made me look up more about bananas. These are suckers separated from the mother and prepped for planting:

[attachment=1890]

The color of the stem base depends on the species (which are many) but white-pink-red-brown shades are very common.

Then I did some more research; an important thing to know when growing bananas is the distinction between a "water sucker" and a "sword sucker". Water suckers are useless for replanting; they develop wide leaves early on, but will develop an inferior root system. Sword suckers appear as a spike, but they develop sturdy roots. The image below shows an undesired water sucker on the left and two sword suckers on the right. It looks as if the VM drawing might communicate something about the type of root that is to be preferred.

[attachment=1891]

When a banana plant has been cut to a stump (or a stump has been replanted) a new leaf will grow from the centre, eventually growing out to a new plant. It's remarkable how this is again reflected in the VM drawing:

[attachment=1892]

Finally, when considering the fruit, it's important to keep in mind that the bananas-on-steroids we see on store shelves today are different than the varieties known originally; also, bananas ripening on the tree have an appearance quite like what we see in the VM:

[attachment=1893]

f13r, not f3r

Updated.. I'd be surprised if that's the only objection

Diane writes that she was not the first to correlate banana and f13r, and credits Edith Sherwood with coming up with the banana ID. See her explanation about this on the forum You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
Sherwood's page is dated to 2013 but that is the last edit, not the date of the original ID, which is probably quite a bit older.
The nuance is that while Sherwood (and many others) see 13r as a banana, Diane's idea is that this folio depicts  the whole Musa "group", however anachronistic that may seem (obviously the notion of a Musaceae family is a Linnean one, so I really don't know what kind of "group" she thinks this depicts).

Banana seems to be a popular ID for 13r, and there are several people making the observation, such as somebody named "AZ Starwatcher" in a 2013 YouTube You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

As you note above, Koen Gh, there are indeed several interesting similarities with banana, so I guess lots of people have reached this conclusion independently.
 
But other possibilities have been put forward:

Back in 2001, Dana Scott identified 13r as Geranium (see ML archive).

JKP makes a different identification for the plant. See the post here:
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Also worth noting regarding this page is Stolfi's 1998 observation (again, see ML archive), that the first vord on the page is "torshor" , which just might be the name of the plant.
Stolfi believed this vord was unique to the page, but back then they didn't have the help of voynichese.com.
Otherwise, he would surely have noted that torshor actually appears in one other place, as line initial in one of the "recipes" on 107r.

I don't think it's banana.

I think it's quite a good drawing of Petasites.


Petasites grows everywhere in temperate and colder zones, and the species that most resemble this (e.g., Petasites officinalis, Petasites hybridus) are wetland plants that grow by rivers. There are a number of different species and some have quite large reddish swellings at the top of the root. Some species have heart-shaped leaves, but there quite a few, including Petasites amplus and P. japnica that have large rounded leaves with edges that develop tears and cuts.

It's the bigger cousin of Tussilago farfara (which is found in many herbal manuscripts). It grows taller and has a larger root than T. farfara.

   
  


Photo credits: pfaf.org and femvital.hu



The shape of the flowers, the way they are attached, the big round leaves, and the swollen root are all characteristic of the plant. I've never had much doubt about this folio as it's one of the more naturalistic drawings.

Thanks, Vviews. I searched the forum and JKP site but nothing showed up, because for some reason I was looking for f3r   Glad that's cleared up.

To think about plants in groups is actually an ancient thing, for example ivy and grape vines were considered varieties of the same plant. So I'd say it's not entirely impossible for a drawing to refer to a group of similar plants, but I just don't think that has to be the case here. Banana plant will do just fine, like that we all know what we're talking about. 

I'm not surprised that banana-ids are widespread, since the drawing is quite naturalistic. 


Thanks for the references. Geranium is certainly a more conservative proposal, though even with the best intentions I fail to see how it could be connected to this plant.

JKP's ID takes much more of the drawing into account - the plant he proposes grows in a similar way to banana, just a lot smaller and without bananas 

This discussion is not new, and thanks to VViews for the older references.

However, I remember other discussions, which I thought were here on voynich.ninja, but a search for 'musa' did not bring them up.

For one thing, the banana plant was not unknown in late medieval Europe.

It can also be found in some copies of the family of herbals known as 'Tractatus de Herbis', with the name 'Musa', for example the 14th C Paris BN Lat 6823, on foll.105v, in Masson 116 on p.238 (I don't have a copy of that), in Sloane 4016 on fol. 63r and in several later ones.
These illustrations do not look like that in the Voynich MS.

That, of course, still leaves open several possibilities.

I found that the group of flowers on top of the illustration of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. looks remarkably like the very first beginnings of the banana fruit (of course if you leave out the very conspicuous purple flower). However, this is also something one might call the typical style of the Voynich MS illustrator, and is found back in other drawings, e.g. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. .

To me this does not look like banana, my first impression was burdock, but I would agree that petasites is a better match.

ReneZ,
you are right, bananas were known in Europe, and one does find entries for Musa (or Mussa) in European manuscripts.
However, the medieval depictions of Musa look very different from what we see in 13r.

(Above, your examples from the BNF and BL manuscripts; below, Tacuinum Sanitatis, BNF Ms. Latin 9333)


This brings me back to one of the recurring issues I have about many Voynich illustrations.
Depending on whether we are seeking similarities with what things actually look like (bananas, sheep/goats, etc...) or with the way they were depicted in the middle ages, we can reach rather different conclusions.

In the case of 13r, the illustration does look like an actual banana, but it does not resemble the way bananas were drawn in the 15th century.

I am struggling to find a medieval Arabic depiction of a banana plant. These might be more realistic. Any ideas?

The flowers are drawn the way the Voynich illustrator commonly draws flowers from the aster family and that's not surprising if you consider that many aster flowers, like the groundsels, like some species of Petasites, do look like this. The have a cylinder-shaped calyx and a little poof of tiny blossoms at the end and just before they fully bloom those little petals are furled so they look like rounded bumps.

Also, the VMS plants that resemble plants from the silene family have larger bladder-like bumps just behind the part where the petals spread and this characteristic has been captured by the illustrator, as well.



As for Petasites, the roots and the leaves are used medicinally and the leaves are harvested before they get too big and stiff, so one would see leaf scars on the plant as are in the drawing.