The British Library's unsolved sword code is a gift to summer puzzlers

We all love to think of ourselves as amateur sleuths, and now there's a new mystery to crack

Geeky is the new sexy. If, like me, you love a good puzzle, then you’re no longer just someone who’s up for a wordsearch of a Sunday afternoon. No, you’re a zeitgeist-busting puzzle-solver. And puzzle-solvers are cool now. Whether it’s Mark Zuckerberg’s hackathons or otterfaced heart throb Benedict Cumberbatch in the Imitation Game, our stock is high. NSA coder Edward Snowdon is so popular that there are multiple agencies desperate to get their hands on him.

We love a good geek

With the summer ahead, I’ve packed in the puzzle books and plan to spend long hours by the pool cryptic-crossword-ing away. But now there's a real-life mystery for me and my fellow-geeks to solve. The British Library have put a 13th Century sword on display in their latest exhibition, and nobody can understand the inscription engraved onto it. The cypher is as follows: NDXOXCHWDRGHDXORVI.

The sword, discovered in a river in Lincolnshire, has outfoxed puzzlers and decoders at the museum and they are hoping that a member of the public will come forward with a solution. The museum's curator of early modern manuscripts certainly doesn't seem to have much of a clue. “If you work on the theory that the language is Latin then the opening three initials, NDX, could be Noster Dominus Christus… but then the rest is gobbledegook,” said Julian Harrison; helpfully adding “it’s not Welsh”.

I don't like an unfinished puzzle: it's like a messy room, or a nagging drawer left ever so slightly open.

This is not the first time that us armchair puzzlers have been invited to help decode messages which have baffled experts. In 2012 the remains of a World War Two carrier pigeon were discovered in a Surrey chimney, a mystery message attached to its foot. The unsolved code went viral and a historian and amateur puzzler from Canada finally cracked it, apparently in just 17 minutes.

What is it about solving a set of clues that gets our hearts racing so fast? From Bletchley Park to GCHQ, there's a certain glamour that surrounds even the nerdiest of code-breakers. And we all like to think of ourselves as amateur sleuths, a la Miss Marple. Witness the popularity of detective series' on TV as proof.

We all like to think of ourselves as a Miss Marple

For me, it's the desire to tidy things up. I don't like an unfinished puzzle: it's like a messy room, or a nagging drawer left ever so slightly open. Call it anal (and plenty have), but I like to get the ends all tied up.

Nevertheless, on this one, I think I'll stick to my wordsearches. Given that I spent over three hours on it last week when someone put to me the challenge to identify which is the only tube station to contain none of the letters in the word "Mackerel" (I shan’t spoil it for you), I rather suspect that the British Library won’t be knocking on my door soon for a solution to NDXOXCHWDRGHDXORVI.