Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts by Quoting from pp.303-304.
Of course, seated at my eyrie overlooking the lower floors of the library in Copenhagen, I stared and stared at that erased line, using a magnifying lens and tipping the manuscript backwards and forwards against the light. So much hinges on that missing name. My fellow students in the Center of Manuskripter og Boghistorie, if they could have seen what I was doing, would have regarded this as eccentric in the extreme, peering for more than an hour at an invisible word on the only unilluminated page in one of the most beautifully illustrated books in the world. I actually enjoy seemingly illegible inscriptions, rather like tackling cryptic crosswords, where one can sometimes reach a solution by piecing out options letter by letter before the word finally falls into place. In a manuscript, as in a crossword, there is (or was once) an answer, if only one can find it. Although the missing words at the opening of the Psalter are heavily scraped off, some of the upper extremities of the ascenders off the erased letters are still just visible. After "dominus" there is space for two or probably three letters without ascenders. Then there was a tall letter which rose above the line and flicked over to the right, precisely like the tip of the 'l' in 'lignum' at the end of the first line, or that beginning 'lauurencio' in line 3. Immediately adjacent to it was another tall letter terminating, with a double flick, both backwards curving towards the possible 'l' and splitting off forwards too, like the top of the high 'd' of 'de crinibus' in line 2. Then there were several low letters. Whatever the name here was, it was certainly not 'magnus rex', which has no ascenders at all. The name appears to have opened blank-blank-blank-'ld'. Suddenly, I got it. Like finally solving a crossword clue, one wonders afterwards why it took so long. The first of the missing words here must surely have been "uualdemarus", Waldemar, presumably Valdemar the Great, king of Denmark 1157-82 and duke of Jutland. He was the grandfather of King Abel, whose wife, Mechtilde of Holstein, owned the manuscript in the thirteenth century. The relics were surely his, and so therefore was the Copenhagen Psalter.
