Updated list of what is left to solve:
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For the chicken - could she have turned downwards a bit and went in to the water at Undine Bay?
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So I’ve been thinking… the first magic word for this lock, “Brachursis” sounds like a mythological animal. (Ursis = Bear?) And the past two months have been all about animals, so chances are the letters we’re gathering for this fragment will also be another strange animal name?
So why don’t we also work on trying to rearrange those letters into different permutations? Like @Robert said, we would definitely expect another vowel or two, so we have a place to start. The book might not let us solve this fragment until we find the places on the map too, but the letters could give us some direction?
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Funnily enough, without rearrangement like @Endri suggested, I had been looking at what mythlogical sounding creatures would fit and came up with Golka (bird demon)… so thought it might have been skullgolka or skallgolka or similar.
Will play with permutations shortly and post.
EDIT: with 10 unique characters, we are looking at 3.6 Million permutations… looking at the 3 unknowns as the same (ie, unknown) reduces that to just about 150K permutations. This is still too many to list here. I will go through and remove unlikely ones (like those starting klk or similar) and see what we are left with.
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Alright, we need vowels. You want vowels? I got vowels. I got tired of staring at pieces of this map over and over hoping for some magical inspiration and have started with brute force. I’ve compiled a list of every location on the map that has a vowel in it’s name (I think, I may have missed a few, but I tried to be thorough).
If our guesses are right, at least two of the names on here should match the clues we’ve been given. We just need to figure out which ones.
Vowel List
A
Lost Citie of Atlantis (in frame at the top)
Allalonestone Rock
A Watch Tower
Storm Area
The Lake of Allhallows
Here is Valhalla and Asgard
This is Actceba (sp?)
Here is Avalon
Amfortas
King Arthur’s Tomb
Here is Sir Auodos
AWor
Here Perseus saves Andromeda
Here are the Argonaurs
E
An Elfin Monastry
Elfin Citie
The Emerald Beaches
Elfin Sound
The Elfin Temple
Excalibore
The House of Echoe
The Enchanted Sea
Elfmel Head
I
This Island is Enchanted
This Great Gate is built of Ivory
The Fortunate Isles lye beyond Moone’s Sphere
Here is Imp Tree
Circe’s Isle
O
Oberon’s shield
Ogres Tongue Cape
100 Fathoms
The Lake of the Oreads
Here is Oberon’s Palace
This is Ole Luk-Ole
The Palace of Old King Cole
Oberon Cross
The Other End of Nowhere and Mother Carey’s Haven (Could also be an ‘E’)
U
Undine Bay
This is Ulysses, his Shippe
Also, while I was compiling this list I had the minor breakthrough of finally noticing that the Sea-King’s Palace is kinda on the map. It’s on the frame on the bottom. The Sea King is the one responsible for tempting Sadko. Maybe that’s a help?
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I’m slow. I’m so bloody slow.
On the map is “The Sea King’s Palace lyeth 1000 fathoms deep.”
Fathom is from Middle English fadme, from Old English fæthm “outstretched arms.”
Millenary means 1000 of something.
1000 outstretched arms reveal Sadko’s temptation. The Sea King’s Palace is the location we need.
Edit: I still don’t know what ‘Look Above CC’ means though.
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Carbon Copy? Cubic Centimeters? CC means 200 in roman numerics?
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Well right above the Sea King’s Palace is the ‘200 Fathoms here’ mark. Looking above that is ‘This is Ulysses, his Shippe’
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Well the updated page7 now gives us
S K _ U L G _ L K A
I’ve tried a few guesses in the book, but if Endri is correct and the Book won’t let us solve this without the last 2 locations then there’s not much point.
So the 2 clues we are left with are.
The numbers -17.733251 and 168.327325
and
that…damned…chicken…
Things I’ve tried.
skoulgolka
skrulgolka
skaulgolka
skuulgolka
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I agree that those four are the most likely, particularly based on my earlier find of Golka = bird demon.
Now we just have to solve the last couple…an ‘o’ and something else.
Remember early on, I suggested the West Beacon as a destination for the chicken, and given that, the Citie of Shagpat and the Sword… what if the destination wasn’t the exactly that, but was Oberon’s shield instead. That would give an ‘o’
Edit: As @Robert pointed out earlier, the co-ordinates remaining are on Vanuatu. I doubt it is anything to do with the university as teh co-ordinates are slightly away from that. However, looking into the myths of the area (and looking particularly for an R or vowels), I found the following:
- The mythologies of Melanesia include many spirits associated with nature and animals. The Adaro are sun spirits, part fish and part human, who use rainbows as bridges and come to earth during sun showers.
- In the Melanesian mythology of Malekula Island, Vanuatu, Ambat is a culture hero recorded by A.B. Deacon. In the myth, Temes Malau has an ogress wife Nevinbumbaau and had a son Mansip. Nevinbumbaau trapped Ambat’s older brothers one after another in a ditch, where they stayed until Ambat came to free them.
- Ruban, a figure of knowledge (from New Guinea though, not Vanuatu)
Edit 2:
This is Actceba (sp?) is Actaeon (not that I think we need him)
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Definitely a lot of Vanatau myths about Ogres and pairs of twins killing Ogres. We do have Ogres Tongue Cape on the map, but I’m not feeling strongly about it.
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Well I am not even going to pretend like I have any clue whats going on after reading all of that haha. But after a long hiatus from most things in my life (you can thank work getting busy, holidays, and family for that), I am back. Now I likely won’t be too much help on this fragment, and from the sounds of things, you have everything under control and just about done.
But as usual, I can contribute what I can… witty banter, a propensity to try my best to organize thoughts, and often many failed attempts at making sense of all of this. Oh, and charm, a whole lot of charm (It is a tough job, but someone has to do it 
). I do have to say I missed you all on my hiatus, but it feels good to be back and catching up. I will try my best to contribute what I can, but like I said, it seems like you are kicking plenty of fragment butt without me.
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@Brendon Good to have you back, we need all the help we can get. We are definitely not close to solving this as I don’t have a clue about the last 2 locations. :-)
Alright, let’s review our chicken pathing. I believe we all agree that the chicken was at the Roc’s Nest, near Rupunzel’s tower. After that this is what happens.
•The fox was lost and roamed the roads for the rest of the day and through the night. With dawn came a shift in fortune, and he found the chicken’s scent near the tower. Chicken was surprised, and a frantic chase began, through waterfalls and caves, o’er hills and woods, until reaching the shore.
•Chicken would have to swim to safety. But all she could see was water, she could see no land to rest on. Then she noticed the man on the sands who looked out and revealed where the nearest point of land would be.
•Poor fox, however, exhausted from running all day and night and day again, had little energy for the swim and soon got into trouble and drowned. When chicken reached dry land, she shook the water from her feathers and sighed.
•Where had her tale ended?
So the important highlights.
After leaving the nest she travelled " through waterfalls and caves, o’er hills and woods, until reaching the shore".
NEED 1: We need to know where the reached the shore.
Chicken decides to swim for it, but cannot see a place to land. She finds someone to help.
“Then she noticed the man on the sands who looked out and revealed where the nearest point of land would be”
NEED 2. We need to know who the ‘man on the sands’ is.
Note that a strict reading of the passage doesn’t necessarily indicate whether she met the man on the sands before getting into the water or during her swim. She might have swam for a while before meeting them. (But then the question I ask myself is, if she saw someone on the sands…why didn’t she swim to them instead of going wherever he was looking.)
NEED 3 We need to know where the ‘man on the sands’ was looking.
That should be our answer.
There are a few ways to tackle this.
We can just look for every ‘man on the sands’ on the map, and follow their gaze to their endpoint and list them. I’m keeping ‘man on the sands’ in quotes, because it might be a reference, or heck might not even be a man. Maybe we all look alike to chickens. That sounds like the easiest way to tackle this, but I’ll be damned if I keep failing to find anything helpful.
We can try to trace every possible path she could have taken from the roc’s nest that goes through waterfalls, caves, hills and forests to a shore line, then swim from there til we hit a person. That’s more in the spirit of the story, but sounds pretty obscure since we don’t have a direction, or distance and her run is called ‘frantic’ which might not even mean she was running in a straight line.
Maybe there’s a clue hidden in the last 3 stanzas we’re missing? A hint to a location or something she passed that I haven’t seen? More sets of eyes on the exact wording given by the journal instead of my parpahrased mumbo jumbo can’t hurt.
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I think I know who the man on the sands are… But I’m on the bus right now when I get home I’ll look at the map and post results
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“Ole Lukøje” is a literary fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen based upon a folk tale telling of a mysterious mythic creature of the Sandman who gently takes children to sleep and, depending on how good or bad they were, shows them various dreams. Wikipedia
@robert
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That totally fits the chicken’s path. We’ve pondered him before. Maybe we just haven’t figured out where he’s looking accurately then.
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It looks like his nose is aiming down so maybe there
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Also remember the outstretched hands thing right by Ole There is Cockpaidle Cape very close
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I don’t know if you guys have seen this but… It talks about how Ole Luk-Oie is actually death
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I think I’m too literal for this puzzle. All I see when I look at Ole Luk-ole is the fact that the closest land is clearly north of him between the Laidley worm and the leprechauns. So obviously the chicken would go that way, but that’s not where he’s looking.
It’s hard for me to accurately figure out where he’s looking over that much distance. It gets awfully close to the island with the Little Mermaid, but the island is unnamed (Unless we need to google her story and find her island?) It could be Seras point, or Never-Never land or St. Brandan’s island, but we’ve guessed most of those.
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