Tintin Forums

Thanks Richard for reporting this first (?) and unique (?) mistake ever in the English versions!
In the French ones, 'hortograffe' (a personal spelling given by Herge for 'orthographe') is really terrible, and all the more strange as the books are mainly designed for kids, have been hardly improved, and some mistakes have even been added!

Some years ago the magazine 'Les amis d'Herge' organized a competition about L'Etoile mysterieuse, the worst album concerning spelling, and about 40 mistakes were recorded.
Maybe this is Herge's childish means to tell Tintin's 'stars' are specifically connected with faults?

PS: 'Lamaserie' with a single 's' is the spelling given by most dictionaries, but both can do.
see http://www.caroloscrabble.be/article.php3?id_article=133

yamilah
Maybe this is Herge's childish means to tell Tintin's 'stars' are specifically connected with faults?

You're implying, not for the first time, that Hergé's "errors" were deliberate signals on his part to lead readers to points in the hidden-meaning tracking game that you believe he embedded in his work.

Well, it's an interesting-ish theory, I suppose. Do you know that theory about the statue of Shakespeare in Westminster Abbey (I think) where the piece of his writing engraved on the stone book he's holding contains a single-word error which is reckoned to be a necessary shift to enable the name of the "true author" of his plays (Francis Bacon, in this case, I think) to be spelt out if a well known Elizabethan cipher-grid system is applied to the passage of writing. Like your Tintin-error theory, I think the very existence of the seemingly-clumsy error in the Shakespeare passage, as well as being necessary to make the cipher-grid produce the right letters, is what alerted codebreakers that the passage might need decoding at all. I'm remembering all that from a radio programme I heard some years ago, so I may have it all wrong!

However, in the case of Hergé, a more obvious theory is that he was just bad at spelling! (A lott of us cartoonists are, I'm afrade.) His English translators were probably much better at spelling, what with Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper being a professional editor. And the Methuen editions would probably have been copyedited as well.

So could you give us an instance of where you think one of Hergé's 'deliberate' spelling errors leads us to a significant clue in his rebus or whatever, so we can better judge between these two theories?

Balthazar
So could you give us an instance of where you think one of Hergé's 'deliberate' spelling errors leads us to a significant clue in his rebus or whatever, so we can better judge between these two theories?

Maybe not just 'one' error can bring a significant clue, but groups of them, just like a cluster of stars* can be seen as a constellation, and a cluster of constellations as the Zodiac*?

yamilah
Maybe not just 'one' error can bring a significant clue, but groups of them, just like a cluster of stars* can be seen as a constellation, and a cluster of constellations as the Zodiac*?

Hmm... With no disrespect, that all seems a bit vague. if Hergé's spelling mistakes really were a way of leaving a secret message to the reader, I'd have expected him to do something a bit more precise with such a cipher technique.

Are you sure that if you add up all the wrong letters in all Hergé's mis-spelt words in all the Tintin books, they don't spell out (in French): "I am the illegitimate grandson of the King of Belgium, and I am also descended directly on my mother's side from Jesus and Mary Magdelene, and all my books were really written and drawn by... AARGH! Too late! They got me!", or something of that sort?

Balthazar
Hmm... With no disrespect, that all seems a bit vague.
Who knows? it might become more clear, if someone took time to focus on the question?

I'd have expected him to do something a bit more precise with such a cipher technique.
Maybe a literary cipher does differ a trifle from a usual mathematical or algorithmic one?

Are you sure that if you add up all the wrong letters in all Hergé's mis-spelt words in all the Tintin books, they don't spell out (in French): "I am ...

This sounds to be a sensible idea! I tried it, but unfortunately it doesn't seem to make any sense. If Tintin were as simple as that, I suppose it would be known by now, wouldn't it?

PS: I read some not very convincing articles about Shakespeare = Bacon; could you please give us a reference or a link about the special writing on the statue in Westminster Abbey? Thanks in advance.