Single Leg Gallows

[Torsten]

I hope everyone agrees that the Author (who devised the script, chose or created the information in the book, etc.) did not write directly onto vellum.  Vellum was expensive (I have seen an estimate of US$1-2 per folio in today's money) and is a pain to erase.  He/she must have written a final draft on paper, and only then got it copied onto vellum.  

As Currier pointed out back in 1976, “The ends of the lines contain what seem to be, in many cases, meaningless symbols: little groups of letters which don’t occur anywhere else, and just look as if they were added to fill out the line to the margin.” That alone suggests the text wasn’t neatly prepared in advance and then simply copied onto the vellum — instead, it looks like the layout was adjusted on the fly.

There are other clues that point in the same direction. For example, glyphs like EVA-y, o, d, or s tend to get added to the first glyph group of a line, and the gallow glyphs often appear at the start of new paragraphs. This inflates the length of the first words in a predictable way.
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. ran some stats on this and found exactly that pattern:

1. The first word of a line is longer than average (l₁ > l).
   
2. The second word is shorter than average (l₂ < l).
   

Note: in nearly half the lines (48%), the second glyph group is shorter than the first, and it’s longer in only 32% of cases. [see Timm 2014].

   

Another example of ambiguity can be seen on folio 105r, specifically in lines 9a and 10. While writing line 10, the scribe left a noticeably larger gap. It appears that the scribe wasn’t entirely satisfied with how the layout turned out. To make the gap less obvious, he used larger gallow glyphs and filled the remaining space between them with additional glyph groups.

So, one reasonable explanation for these findings is that the scribe was adjusting the glyph groups as they went, choosing them to make the lines fit neatly into the available space. In other words, the margins weren’t something the author accounted for separately — the text layout and the writing happened together, right there on the vellum. 

That’s why I believe the scribe wasn’t simply copying pre-written content but was actively generating the text during the writing process.