CiSRA Puzzle Competition 2009 - Solutions

This is the archive of the 2009 Puzzle Competition. Please visit the current competition site for information about the latest Puzzle Competition.

D.4 Date with Destiny

Each date on this calendar is a famous decapitation. Most of the dates are in the standard western calendar of the day (Julian or Gregorian, as the case may be). The red dates, however, refer to French victims, and are given in the French Revolutionary Calendar, which has different month names and denotes years with Roman numerals, beginning in the year of the Revolution, 1792.

Following the path indicated by the circles, starting at the 16th, we have:

Georges Danton	16 Germinal II
Simon Fraser, 11th Lord Lovat	07 Apr 1747
King Louis XVI	02 Pluviôse I
Anne Boleyn	19 May 1536
Thomas Wyatt the younger	11 Apr 1554
Guru Tegh Bahadur	11 Nov 1675
Alice Lisle	02 Sep 1685
James Stanley, 7th Earl of Derby	15 Oct 1651
Ishida Mitsunari	06 Nov 1600
John Tiptoft, 1st Earl of Worcester	18 Oct 1470
Jane Boleyn	13 Feb 1542
Richard FitzAlan, 11th Earl of Arundel	21 Sep 1397
Asano Naganori	21 Apr 1701
Edward Plantagenet, 17th Earl of Warwick	28 Nov 1499
Richard Neville, 5th Earl of Salisbury	31 Dec 1460
Thomas Plantagenet, 2nd Earl of Lancaster	22 Mar 1322
John Dudley, 1st Duke of Nurthumberland	22 Aug 1553
Edward Thatch, a.k.a. Blackbeard	22 Nov 1718

In each case the name of the month is missing from the puzzle, except for the unfortunate King Louis in Pluviôse, in which the missing information is the year - the missing year in this case is the year I of the Revolutionary Calendar.

Reading the initials of each missing month and "I" for Louis XVI, we get the phrase:

GAIMAN SON OF SANDMAN

The son of Sandman (a.k.a. Dream, a.k.a. Morpheus) in the Sandman comics by Neil Gaiman, is ORPHEUS (also a famously decapitated fellow), which is the answer.