Enigmatic Variations No. 1751: In The Dock by Karla

I think I’d rather be put IN THE DOCK by Karla than Kafka…but after a quick-ish start this turned out to be a bit of a ‘Trial‘…

The preamble states that:

“One unclued entry relates to a writer’s journey. Corrected misprints in definitions of 21 clues give a work and a hint to where single-letter change is required after grid fill to reveal the writer’s title and a group who were IN THE DOCK after the journey. Initial letters of remaining clues give an epithet All but two letters of an entry related to the writer’s companion on the journey should be changed to reveal one word of the group’s location, leaving real words. Solvers should highlight 1) the writer’s title 2) the companion and 3) one word of the unclued entry plus the changed location entry (27 cells in total, in four straight lines). Chambers Dictionary (2016) is recommended.”

Got all that? Good, then we’ll continue…or maybe we’ll just re-read it carefully a few times and still not quite understand…and then start solving as much as we can to see what might help to bring all that together…

On a whim, I dropped to the bottom right of the page and started solving from the bottom up. ULNA, GALE, SYNC and ENEW yielded quite quickly and the bottom half filled up at a pleasing rate…although VICTORESSES was a strange never-seen-before-and-probably-never-again-outside-a-crossword-grid word. The top half took a while longer, but eventually filled up, leaving the unclued 23A as most likely to be THE NORTH SEA.

And then I hit a bit of a block and, a bit like a competitor on Taskmaster, where they think they have completed things only to be given a second task by Alex Horne, I had to revisit the preamble and trawl through all the clues to try and make sense of the end game – as I had blithely got onto a solving roll and not worried too much about recording all the misprints/initial letters.

Misprints seemed to give something along the lines of DEMONOLOGY from the Across clues and S? ?ORNER from the Downs…nothing too obvious, but a bit more detailed analysis gave DAEMONOLOGIE, and a little Wiki-oogling pointed me in the direction of King James I and the Witches (changing WATCHES to WITCHES in the SW CORNER) of North Berwick (changing  DENMARK to BERWICK, leaving real words.) However, that wasn’t the whole story – it turns out James I was also regnal number VI above the border in Scotland, so JAMES VI AND I, with the I from WATCHES/WITCHES doing double duty, and he travelled across THE NORTH SEA to bring back his betrothed ANNE OF DENMARK (who had seemed unwilling to make the journey alone), before dealing with said witches and producing his ‘Daemonologie‘ work…

Finally, the initial letters of non-misprint clues give ‘THE WISEST FOOL IN CHRISTENDOM’ – an epithet about James put about by contemporary courtier Anthony Weldon.

Apologies, but the PD grid utility seems to have developed an issue – or maybe there is a user error on my part – where colouring any cell seems to obscure its letter… so for those of you watching in black and white, the highlighted items are i) the writer, JAMES VI AND I; ii) the companion ANNE; iii) the word NORTH from 23A and the changed Denmark to BERWICK; and iv) the pink is next to the green…(;+>)

Wow – after a relatively quick grid-fill I was taken on an educational journey of mind-expanding proportions…at various points along the way I felt like the wisest fool in Cruciverbal-dom!…

My thanks to Karla for the challenge, and ‘chapeau‘ for an impressive grid construction, with so much thematic stuff going on, maintaining symmetry and real words. (And I forgot to mention the quality of the clueing, given the constraints of the misprints and epithet initials). I trust all is clear below…