Enigmatic Variations No. 1096: Demand by Samuel

The preamble to DEMAND tells us that ‘the hunt is on’ for the unclued 14D. In 34 clues an extra letter in the wordplay will give us a ‘group’ met on the way, and their ‘demand’. Ten symmetrically placed answers must then be tweaked to meet this demand.

The scheduling gods have been kind to me this month – after a spate of EVs that I haven’t been able to complete, for one reason or another (mostly because I found them particularly difficult! But also due to time pressures…), my turn on the rota throws up a puzzle with a theme which is a personal favourite, and which caused me much pleasure in solving!

The sensible thing to do might have been to attack those clues crossing 14D first, to try and get some idea of those six crossing letters, but I just sort of ploughed on in from the start. Solving was slightly complicated by that ’34 clues’ stipulation – so not ALL clues would have an extra letter, meaning you sometimes had to look at them twice – once assuming they were normal, then assuming there might be an extra letter.

That said, quite a few answers fell out for me on the first pass and I soon had 14D as H??Y????L and something just clicked: HOLY GRAIL! Which was certainly searched for (rather than ‘hunted’ for?) in many ways throughout history, literature and film.

This could need reference to any one of a multitude of treatments of the Holy Grail story, but my first thought (and hope) was Monty Python and the Holy Grail – one of the formative influences on my dim and distant youth…

And so it came to be – the extra letters started to spell out ‘THE KNIGHTS WHO SAY ‘NI’ – one of the many groups the Pythonian knights meet along the way – and of course the ‘Knights Who Say Ni‘ DEMAND a sacrifice…WE WANT (dramatic pause) A SHRUBBERY!

Apologies to those who maybe don’t know, or even (sacrilege! heresy!) don’t like the film, or Monty Python in general, but I could sit here all day quoting and re-enacting bits of Python until the sheep fly home… In fact this triggered off so much nostalgia and enjoyment that I nearly forgot the last part of the preamble – the ten substitutions/tweaks to meet the knights’ demand. I had noticed IBEX and ELVER as possible changes – to ILEX and ELDER respectively, but I then needed a mad rush to track the rest down just before submitting my entry. This was helped by the fact that they were all symmetrically placed, so really only 5 needed to be found – and I learned a few new shrubs along the way. (Ones that look nice, and not too expensive!…)

IBEX -> ILEX and ALME -> ALOE; ELVER -> ELDER and YUKON -> YUPON, etc.:

What more to say – a cleverly constructed puzzle on a wonderful theme; a pleasant coincidence that I got to blog it, having enjoyed solving it so much; and interesting timing, given the recent announcement of the Python re-union concerts next year – did Samuel have some advance knowledge of this? Cardinal Fang – fetch the comfy chair – we must subject Samuel to an inquisition on this at once… His main weapon is the anagram. Anagrams and double definitions. Two weapons. His two main weapons are anagrams and double definitions. And hidden words. Three main weapons. I’ll start again… (;+>)