Guardian 28,536 / Maskarade

77 comments on “Guardian 28,536 / Maskarade”

1. I thoroughly enjoyed both ‘phases’ of this huge puzzle: solving enough clues to create a mass of answers with which to start the jigsaw and then putting the pieces together.

   My first theme name was ALBERICH, followed by BRUNNHILDE, and these were enough to point me to the theme. When I had all but 10 of the pieces I started the jigsaw and found that I could do so with TENNIS SHOE and BRUNNHILDE (symmetrically) near the centre.

   Using my collection of 8-letter words, and some others, I reached the bottom and right-hand edges of the grid and got the few letters I needed to place the first and the fourth thematic names in the perimeter: DIE WALKURE and DAS RHEINGOLD. It was very satisfying, as the jigsaw progressed, to get enough crossing letters to help with the 10 clues that I was unable to ‘cold’ solve earlier.

   It was an interesting theme, which I knew something about, and I learned some new names from that cycle of Wagner operas. It was a very impressive gridfill incorporating several long words, and with a neat placement for the word CADDIE.

   Thanks to Maskarade and mhl.

2. Thanks mhl, a more friendly Bank Holiday special I thought, even though I had to resort to Wikipedia for the characters – I assumed Siegmund came after Sieglinde for instance, never having heard of most of the Valkyries. Agree with you about GETS FREE – I had GOES FREE for a while. Likewise with the 3-letter words DEI and EIN starting the grid fill at the perimeter, along with BRUNNHILDE in the middle once TENNIS SHOE was eliminated. Good job the DIE from the split CAD-DIE didn’t occupy the perimeter slots.
   Thanks Maskarade.

3. I’m sure that I’m not alone in not finishing this one, even though I got the theme really early on, I was completely fooled into thinking it was an alphabetical, and kept on trying to find answers starting with ALL the letters of the alphabet!!!

   I presumed the last clue at least would start with a Z.

   So gave up too soon!!! Especially busy with work this week anyway….

4. Had a great time with this and managed to finish which is rare for me for these massive ones, with help from the internet for many of the Ring names and UK places–also had trouble with FRIERN, and I had to look at lists of place names for NANTWICH (I had “nan” at least, but though maybe I was trying to put a kind of dog in NAN N) and AYNHO (got AY, but the rest was NHO for me). AGNAIL new to me as well.

   With jigsaw puzzles sometimes I get a few and then am banjaxed with no cross-lights, but here once I figured out the them (from ALBERICH–one thing, that should be red) the letters round the side gave me enough of a foothold. Great construction.

   Thanks maskarade and mhl for the blog!

5. Thanks mhl. I quailed at the special instructions but then rejoiced to have the first six a-answers leap out. Anagrams yielded the theme and the googled Ring cast was the key to unravelling. Masterpiece of a jigsaw, the perimeter only helping notably towards the end. One howler – the sound of Koreans seeing TAEKWONDO (which was first presented at the 1988 Seoul Olympics) being attributed to their former unloved colonial masters.

6. The Dei definition is very specific – it is most logically the genitive singular of deus, meaning “of a god”, and therefore god’s; if one took the punctuation as deliberately misleading, it could also be nominative plural and mean gods. But I think the underlined definition should be “Caesar’s god’s”. And to get classically pedantic, Archimedes would probably have called out “Heureka” – Greek for “I have discovered”. But many thanks for a very enjoyable crossword, and my fault entirely for entering Fafnir rather than Fafner.

7. Thanks mhl and Maskarade.
   I am in awe. All I can say is it is a masterpiece for setting. To have a grid that fits this nina and have 14 themers…… Thanks, again.

8. I don’t know Wagner particularly well but I do know some languages, and that certainly helped in several clues. It was clear from early on that there were clues with anagram fodder for words I didn’t know, so I proceeded to get most of the non-theme clues first before tackling that. RING (alas no CYCLE yet) and SIEG pointed me in the right direction. I didn’t know the Scottish WALE but I did know the Norwegian valg for choice (both descended from Old Norse), so from then on it was a matter of looking up the character names and finding where they went. And FWIW I grew up just a few miles from FRIERN Barnet, so that particular one was easy for me, if surprising.

   To get that perimeter to work out was just brilliant grid construction, bravo Maskarade!

   I was puzzled over C for canine in NANTWICH, and whether there might be a kind of mismatch in caravan and UNDER TOW (the sun is hot for example, but they are not synonyms), but there were no other alternatives.

9. Hugely enjoyable way to pass a bank holiday weekend. Bravo Maskarade! And many thanks for the blog, mhl, which must have taken some time to write, so well done – although the only one I couldn’t parse satisfactorily was UNDERTOW and it seems you had similar difficulties to me on that one, so I’m none the wiser. Agreed that the placement was surprisingly easy, despite the unclear directions in the preamble regarding the outer ring. The two 10-letter solutions sorted themselves out and the rest cascaded from there.

   I’m not a Wagner fan by any stretch of the imagination, but the key theme clue came readily (without checking, I think it was the only two-word solution without definition? Easy enough to pick out, anyway). I knew a few of the characters but had to resort to Wikipedia for assistance for most of the rest – although the wordplay for all the theme answers was exemplary so I wish I’d persevered and gone with my gut – probably could have worked them all out eventually. (I knew BRUNNHILDE from the Bugs Bunny cartoon “What’s opera, Doc?” – yes, I’m one of the few who enjoyed Paul’s recent Warner Bros themed puzzle!)

   Just a few dodgy clues that were more general knowledge and barely cryptic (eg EUREKA!) but I guess you need a few of those in a puzzle like this to help you get started, and far more hits than misses overall. Highlights for me include AB INITIO, FAFNER, MATING, NODE, REAL ALES

   For “Taking a trip” I had ON ACID until the penny dropped on the parsing!

   I’m not sure if GUN is metonymy or synecdoche, but it’s a fine distinction anyway.

   We’ve had D for deserted in another puzzle recently, and it was contentious there too.

   We’ve also had this spelling of MALEMUTE recently too – funny how these things come in waves.

10. Thanks Sagittarius @6 – DEI didn’t make total sense to me – I got the general gist but your explanation is helpful.

11. One other thing i just remembered: I had BEDHEADS (instead of BOLSTERS) at first, which held me up with the grid placement until I decided it had to be wrong. Anyone else?

12. Phew! An octagonal grid with 70 lights, no numbers, no letters and obscure instructions which turned out to not know their top from their bottom. Fortunately we were in complete lockdown here in New Zealand and tackling this was marginally preferable to splitting firewood. But I quickly got the theme and was hooked. Mrs Google and I solved about half the clues and then looked at the grid, and what joy; a whole new puzzle inside the puzzle because the ring cycle wouldn’t fit with the answers. With 3 other possible bottom right squares I tried again and again and eventually in a different order, which worked. All I had had to do was turn the octagon clockwise through 90 degrees to find the right square to start. Then they answers came as quickly as I could write them in until the 7 letter ‘E’ word which completely eluded me and so sadly I didn’t quite finish. Friern Barnet in north London was mainly known for its huge mental hospital, also called Coney Hatch, which had the longest corridoor in Europe

13. Thank you Maskarade and mhl.

    I was snagged by UNDERTOW. I was wondering if ‘which may be’ would satisfy the ‘perhaps’ indicator, ignoring the comma after CARAVAN?

    Thanks too mhl for including umlauts and accents in the solutions. I find it strange that English language crosswords usually don’t have diacritics, or their equivalents, in the answers. Why clue those letters at all if they’re not indicated in the wordplay, or not going to appear correctly in the printed solution?
    It’s a very Anglocentric approach. Diacritics are critical! 🙂

    At least in this Maskarade we could happily write them in., or not. I didn’t get as far as the grid-fill, but enjoyed ‘cold-solving’ the clues.

14. Yep, widdersbel @ 11, but I didn’t get as far as the grid so remained blissfully unaware..

15. Thanks for the blog, I think the instructions should have been better, the ring cycle does not START with Die Walkurie. Fortunately the 3 letter words gave it away. I have seen an identical idea using the perimeter for a Listener crossword about 20 years ago.
    Two dodgy answers really, AYNHO and FRIERN but this is a low number for such a complex puzzle.
    Grumbles over, I really enjoyed this, sitting in the sun and invading the grid from all the first letters across the top and down the left. Sometimes these large grids become a chore just from the sheer number of clues but this felt very light perhaps due to the theme and jigsaw nature. I could happily have done it for another hour,.

16. Wow, this was truly an impressive puzzle! Kudos to Maskarade for this masterpiece.

    I was very satisfied that I solved it and could parse all my solutions. My way into the theme was via the clue for WOTAN, which led me to the Ring Cycle.

    My favourites: EXILE, FUSILLI, AB INITIO, EEYORE.

    New for me: Nintendo GameCube; NANTWICH (Cheshire town); André RIEU; A10 road for AB INITIO; composer Hanns EISLER; WALE = choice (Scottish); and FRIERN Barnet (suburban area within the London Borough of Barnet) – this was my LOI.

    Thanks, both.

17. Best Mask I can remember-but I do like my music

18. Five and a half hours of fun!

    My method of fitting the perimeter was as mhi’s (once I had ruled out the English titles on letter count). However, I struggled to decide where BRUNNHILDE went because I hadn’t solved enough B clues. BRUNNHILDE was my first character clue and quickly led to the theme.

    I was another working back from the last clue beginning with a Z, till the light dawned

    Thanks mhi and M.

19. That took rather a while, but it was very satisfying to plug in the last of the answers into the grid! It’s a long time since I’ve heard the ring cycle (I had it on cassette once, and used to listen to it in the car – I stopped doing that when I caught myself speeding up to the Ride of the Valkyrie.) For me, the way into the theme was GUTRUNE, followed by a confirming look back at the anagram for ALBERICH I’d failed to spot earlier. And I got the order of the perimeter once I had EIN and DEI (I liked that clue).

    I had about 40 of the solutions when I started on the grid, but I’ve usually been happy to plug in words on spec, even if I can’t fully justify the placement. I reckon with jigsaws if you have two or three solutions that fit together in the grid, the odds are that this is bad luck are pretty low. Maybe I was lucky, but it all came together eventually without needing to backtrack.

    I did try to avoid looking up a character list for the Ring as long as possible, but had to in the end to get some names I really didn’t recognise at all, like some of the Rhine maidens or the Valkyrie. And although I knew BRUNNHILDE, of course, I thought she only had one ‘N’ (I often have trouble with double letters, which is a hinderance with crosswords!).

    AZOIC, AYNHO, EISLER and BOG OAK were new to me (is Bog Oak really petrified?) but I used to live not far from Friern Barnet, so that was easy – although I didn’t get the Milton reference.

    A lovely bit of work from Maskerade, thanks for that, and thanks, mhl, for such a comprehensive blog.

20. Many thanks Maskarade for creating this tour de force. After getting a gratifying number of answers on the first pass (after ATHENA meant I abandoned the assumption it was A then B etc clue by clue), my heart sank a little when Ring Cycle emerged for the key clue as I could only bring a few mangled names to mind but once I’d decided on googling the specifics the fun continued. A few loose ends on Monday morning the whole beautiful grid sat there in splendour! The parsing of NANTWICH escaped me. Thank you mhl for that and the rest of your excellent blog. I was worried for a while as I had a half-parsed MECCA as the gambling paradise so no 6 letter words end with U. I was very pleased when the penny dropped for MaCAU(LAY).
    It still rather boggles my mind that a setter would come up with a grid which fits so perfectly with the 4 parts of the ring. It was clever misdirection to
    Imply ( but not actually say) they would be in the normal order.

21. Ugh. Spent a couple of hours getting clues. Ultimately not enough to start putting them in the grid, so abandoned it early on. Now I can see the theme, I’m glad I did. Much happier now Paul is back this week.

22. 5 letter words.

23. Sheer delight as pennies dropped + theme revealed. Perfect for BH weekend. For once, knew I’d got it right though couldn’t parse a couple. THER(EMIN) was new. Never knowingly been, but have always known of NANTWICH: maybe for its salt or leather? AYNHO sign remembered from long distance journeys pre-M40. But FRIERN Barnet absolutely new. Fascinating names. What an amazing + humbling construction. Great thanks, Maskarade.

24. Fun puzzle with a clever theme, one little niggle is that Tae kwon do is Korean rather than Japanese, but the answer was clear enough anyway.

    Thanks Maskerade and Mhl

25. I agree with PDM @13 for UNDERTOW, punctuation can always be ignored in a clue, so “caravan which may be “.
    Like Gonzo@2 I had GOES FREE in, right until the end, GANGED was my last one in. I now think GETS FREE is better for both parts of the clue.

26. I got so ‘into’ this I stayed up late on Mon evening to get it done.

    Found the Ring Cycle via the (ALBERICH)* The weirdly worded rubric held me up for a bit. Roz @earlier, you say the Ring Cycle doesn’t start with Die Walkure (sorry for no diacritics) but it kind of does. Wagner himself says the cycle begins with DW, and RHEINGOLD is a vorabend – a kind of intro. Anyhow, even though I kind of knew that, I was bashing my head on the trial and error of ‘which square is the bottom right?’ — so eventually went and had a browse on the internet where someone helpfully pointed out that the ‘start’ is actually in the ‘top of the right column’. With hindsight, it might have been better not to have specified this part of the solution, but to allow the grid perimeter to come out as a gigantic and hugely impressive Nina. My other quibble is ‘Ring Cycle’ is entered as 2 words, not specified (unlike say ON TOUR, REAL ALES) whereas the split of the very clever CADDIE is.

    Like some others I had GOES FREE, for the freeloading escaper – seems to fit far better.

    Sounds like a lot of quibbles, but actually this was huge fun, played out to a soundtrack of the famous Solti interpretation courtesy of a music streaming service.

    Thanks Maskarade for this tour de force, to mhl for blogging the epic so thoroughly and to all other learned contributors on here!

27. Thanks everyone for the great comments! I’ve applied some correction (highlighting ALBERICH, noting the error in TAE KWON DO, suggesting the better parsing of “Caravan, which may be”.

    widdersbel@11 – I had trouble with the ambiguity of “They support retirees” as well, although I was thinking it would be BEDPOSTS for a long time.

28. Absolute masterpiece. I know almost nothing about the Ring Cycle but got Alberich very early which led me to the theme and the four perimerter parts (via Google); ein allowed me to get the first of the parts around the edge and then it was a case of working through the rest. Took a while but very satisfying.

29. A hugely impressive tour de force which gave me a lot of fun. The theme was easily got, as for me at least this was very much home territory (I actually slotted in the last few solutions on returning from the Glyndebourne Tristan and Isolde at the Proms).
    I managed to crack all but 8 of the clues before starting the jigsaw. The misdirection about the perimeter held me up for some time (pace Canberragirl@20, the elements were not in the wrong order, but didn’t start with the opera you’d expect) but then I was away.
    Unlike some of Maskarade’s previous festive puzzles, this one contained no really obscure words, which must have taken some doing. Unless you count FRIERN Barnet, but having been born and brought up within a mile of that unremarkable suburb, I don’t. Notable for being the only part of Barnet which, before local government reorganisation in 1965 was in Middlesex rather than Hertfordshire. Having known it all my life, I still don’t know whether it’s pronounced Free-ern or Fry-ern.

30. Superb puzzle, which I, unusually for a jigsaw puzzle, managed to finish thanks in the main to the two three letter words round the outside. I can’t add anything to the comments already left, except to say that the clue for AB INITIO might have been better if ‘a’ road to Kings Lynn had been used. As a good Norfolk boy, I was trying to fit A47 into the answer, and it wouldn’t go!
    Thanks to Maskerade for an accessible, fun Bank Holiday puzzle, which was also educational.

31. A brilliant piece of grid filling and a very enjoyable puzzle to solve. I am no expert on the theme, but it was easy enough to find a list of roles thanks to Wikipedia. Got the theme pretty early from ALBERICH and had all of the themers and two thirds of the rest before entering anything in the grid, and as so often with jigsaws the last few dropped into place pretty quickly. As so often with these things, the wording of the special instruction should have been tighter, but I think the puzzle would have been very difficult without knowing anything about the perimeter.

    Thanks to Maskarade and mhl

32. Don’t understand the quibbles about GETS FREE. If I escape from a prison, sewer or argument, I get free. If I don’t pay, I get (it) free. GOES FREE serms too inactive for an escape.

33. I think (like some others here) that the special instructions should have started “top right” not “bottom right”. Otherwise brilliant.
    I assumed that Siegmund would be in there somewhere (major character in Walkure) so shoved him in instead of Siegrune. This held up my finishing the puzzle.

34. Great puzzle, but I was tripped up by the instructions which I found infuriatingly imprecise, perhaps even misleading. Perhaps I should have realised that the three letter solutions wouldn’t slot in if one begins with the first opera, but I assumed it was a byproduct of the split solution. All easily solved if the instructions had read to begin in the uppermost square in the right column, or at least told us that the operas weren’t in order of narrative, or composition.

35. Enjoyed the puzzle, and managed to finish it by Saturday evening, but I felt the theme resulted (for a non-specialist) in several obscure answers which involved looking through a Wikipedia list – easy enough, but not really what a crossword is about.

    I start alphabetics at the end, with the rarer letters, and work backwards, which I find more useful usually, but it did not really work here. However, ‘German victory’ had to start with SIEG, which gave a hint, and eventually GUTRUNE was fairly clear, so it was a question of looking up who she was, to disclose the theme.

    I did think the rubric should have said the four components began at the top of the right column, not the bottom right box. It misled me into completing the outside from the wrong place, until I saw where DEI (God’s – genitive) and thus SIEGFRIED must go. EIN and RHEINGOLD confirmed it.

    Agree about Korea, not Japan, though this did not obscure the solution. Thanks, mhl, and particularly for explaining NANTWICH. While I know of FRIERN, and had no problem with it, I agree with your comments about obscurity. And thanks, Maskarade.

36. I wouldn’t appear on any part of a venn diagram of people who like Masksarade’s jigsaws and people who know about the Ring Cycle so, despite getting the theme from the first clue I looked at, WOTAN, I gave this one a miss. I do wish the Guardian would publish a normal cryptic as well on bank holidays

37. I’ve been a Wagner obsessive for over 40 years, so this was pure pleasure for me. For once I was able to use knowledge rather than lists from the web to get the theme answers. I’m delighted at the (so far) enthusiastic comments as I feared this puzzle would get monstered. Opera, especially Wagner, has not always been a popular theme here in the past.

    After getting a couple of theme answers I took a punt and entered the four operas in the perimeter, starting at the bottom right square with DAS RHEINGOLD. If I remember correctly, I then found the actual placement by determining the position of the only occurrence of the letter N in the four titles. Epee Sharkey is of course correct that the cycle proper starts with Die Walkure, but it’s reasonable to expect the operas to be listed in performance order, starting from where we were told to start.

    Like others, I had problems with BOLSTERS, seeing that BEDHEADS or BEDPOSTS are plausible alternatives. Generally I like cryptic definition clues but I’m not sure they have a place in puzzles like this where a lot of cold solving is required.

    Those two minor points apart. a terrific effort. Thanks Maskarade!

38. Bodycheetah, I’m in your part of that diagram, but I’m also in, do the cryptic crossword every Saturday. An alternative would be nice. The Ring Cycle, again … groan. However, we did finish it. I also agree with Roz, and sjshart, I lost a bit of time trying to start with Das Rheingold bottom right. It only clicked when I worked out “Dei” and realised my idea of “ein” on the right must be correct. With you too Roz about “gets free”, I had goes free for ages until it became apparent it could not fit. And, broke my rules about using Google for a couple of the characters.

39. [ A lot of Wagner fans clearly, you might like to try an old Listener crossword 3499 if you can track it down, I have no idea how to find it myself. Obviously this is a bit of a spoiler but it was 1999 so do not think many people would be waiting to do it anyway. ]

40. Hello to all the early risers. round the world.
    This was a treat, though I never started on it till Bank Holiday Monday. Got all the A’s and B’s, spotting Alberich and Brunnhilde and so the theme. However, like Brownphel @12 the instructions had me starting with Das Rheingold at bottom right and nothing then worked. However Brunnhilde was the only 10 letter with a nearby 8 so the S at the end of BOLSTERS place the operas in the correct order round the grid. The presence of four three-letter words on the grid was puzzling until the CADDIE split became clear. This was a magnificent construction and congratulations to Maskerade, and mhl for cataloguing things.

41. Lovely solve – took me all weekend. My only grumble was over BOLSTERS (where BEDPOSTS is surely at least as good) – such is the way for weak-ish cryptic definitions. But so much more to more than make up for that – I really liked the help I got from the alphabetical ordering, the jigsaw was somehow even more satisfying than usual as a logical puzzle as well as many many good clues.

    I’m not remotely familiar with the works in question so allowed myself the use of the relevant Wikipedia article, which didn’t detract from the fun…
    MALEMUTE was new for me and LOI.

42. What the vast majority have said. Managed about two-thirds but ducked out in the knowledge that I could have finished if I really tried! Had other things to do.

    Worked out the starting point for the ring but even if Rheingold was an ‘intro’ rather than the ‘first proper’, where’s the logic of putting it at the end rather than just instructing us to start top-right? Having worked it out from the two three-letter answers, I was left feeling it was a mistake and so could there be others?

    But none of this distracts from what was truly a Meisterstück and I hope Masquerade is really proud. Remember, folks, this is FREE entertainment and no one is forced to take part. Constructive comments and indeed criticism is educational and helpful to us all, including the setter. If all you want to do is dismiss out of hand, keep it to yourself.

    Ra!

43. Me@42

    …detracts …

44. Like so many here, I really enjoyed this puzzle and whiled away many a happy hour over the weekend (and into the week for the final few bits of parsing), solving, fitting and reconstructing the solutions. I am not an expert on this work but know enough about it to have identified the titles and to know a few of the names of its protagonists: [Brunnhilde was more familiar to me from the recent Tarantino film, Django Unchained, and the retelling of a little part the legend there by the excellent Christoph Waltz]. Musician friends and family are much more familiar with

    The instructions were arguably a little over-specific but I thought were totally fair with the EIN and the DEI as the major keys to the placement. I also had BEDPOSTS rather than BOLSTERS but the 10-letter clues of BRUNNHILDE and TENNIS SHOES were the key to the interior so I knew there was something fishy going on there.

    I knew NANTWICH and FRIERN but could not parse either with total conviction.

    Thanks mhl for the excellent blog and to Maskarade for a real tour de force.

45. Hmm. I wasn’t intending to dismiss out of hand. However, having enjoyed Guardian crosswords for over forty years now, I think I have come to the conclusion that I prefer difficult wordplay to themes, ninas and suchlike. Because I didn’t trust my instinct to ignore the instructions and start filling in, I found I had most of the answers before entering any. This then becomes, for me anyway, a different exercice, which I find less entertaining, as opposed to solving clues from the clue and the crossing letters, But you’re right, it’s free and I could have given up and done something else, and I didn’t mean to be disparaging.

46. What a splendid crossword! I had a spot of bother trying to decide between VALKYRIE(S) WALKUERE AND WALKURE with and without DIE/THE but once I decided to use the German but ignore the umlauts (which makes me wince) the letter count worked.
    Thanks to mhl and a round of applause for Maskerade!

47. TIm Phillips’ @42 refers to Masquerade. The fact that our setter has chosen to call himself ‘Maskarade’ shows him to be a true opera buff – presumably taken from the opera of that name by the composer Carl Nielsen. It’s a splendid piece that deserves do be played outside Denmark more often than it is. Covent Garden put on a rather underwhelming production years ago – time for another go in my view.

48. It isn’t “free” entertainment. What a strange thing to say.

49. I partly agree with nascotwoodfrog @45 in that I had to solve the vast majority of clues individually before I felt I could start entering anything in the grid. This does indeed make for rather a different sort of challenge to the normal crossword. I seem to recall that with Araucaria’s Alphabeticals you could usually figure out where to enter some answers quite early on.

    But I did in fact enjoy this tremendously. Luckily I had the time to spare over the weekend, and it was a hugely entertaining challenge. And what a magnificent feat of grid construction.

    Many thanks Maskarade and mhl.

50. Me@46: Maskarade!

51. Andrew B @ 48. Guardian crosswords, along with those from the Indy and FT, are free to download or solve online (not the latter for the FT).

52. Several commenters have complained that the instructions were misleading or wrong about the start point for the peripheral nina. I agree with Epee Sharkey @26: “Wagner himself says the cycle begins with [Die Walkure], and RHEINGOLD is a vorabend – a kind of intro.” So I think this is justifiable misdirection from Maskarade, besides which the instructions don’t specify that the four parts are in order (though they are – after a fashion!).

    bodycheetah @36. Like you I’m almost totally ignorant when it comes to Wagner, though my headmaster at primary school took a group of us to the Royal Festival Hall in 1964 where we heard, among others, The Ride of the Valkyries. I knew some of the characters from my obsession as a 12-year-old with the Norse mythology on which the Ring Cycle is based, though Brunhilde had one N not two, and FAFNER and HAGEN were Fafnir and Hogni to me. OK, I had to consult Wiki to confirm the names of the operas, though it turned out I’d remembered them all correctly except for the German spelling of Valkyrie! All the characters (though largely unknown to me – I’m more familiar with AYNHO) came from the wordplay.

    Many thanks to Maskarade for a grand work on an operatic scale, and well done mhl for the blog.

53. Well this was very clever and I enjoyed it as far as I got! My heart leapt when I saw it was an alphabetical jigsaw, then plummeted when I realised the RIng Cycle connection. Wikipedia only yielded 10 of the 14 and I was utterly stumped for the others. I got about 80% of the answers and filled in half the grid but gave up when I struggled over several words with the same start and end letter and couldn’t place them. The three-letter answers were my way into placing the 4 parts around the perimeter: I had them first in Wikipedia’s stated order, which set me back.

54. [Andrew B @48 is quite right. As an almost lifelong reader of the Guardian (there’s a photo of me aged four on Brighton beach, pointing out something in the Manchester Guardian to my younger brother), it gets my goat just a little to hear the crossword described as “FREE”. No doubt there are many here, happy to criticise the setters and the crossword editor for mistakes and sloppiness, who are not making any contribution towards the Guardian’s continued existence as an independent campaigning newspaper where “Comment is free…but facts are sacred”. That’s your choice, of course.

    A monthly subscription to the Guardian online costs £11.99 (after an introductory three months at £5.99 a month), which works out at less than 50p per puzzle. Please think about it. Less than £3 a week is not much for this standard of entertainment.]

55. I solved all but 3 or 4 of the clues and began to try to fit them in with Das Rheingold at the bottom right-hand corner but they didn’t fit, whichever of the 4 just about possible starting places you chose (one of which was the obvious one). Starting with Die Walkurie because it is the start of the cycle is pretty specialised knowledge and doesn’t work in the context of this puzzle as there is no where to put Das Rheingold if you do. I gave up.
    I was going to say that this was another of Maskarade’s puzzles that probably gives more satisfaction to the setter than the solver but judging by the comments above I would be wrong.
    My favourite performance of the Ring and the only one I’m prepared to listen to is Anna Russell’s which has the added advantage of only lasting 22 minutes. I don’t do links but Googling “Anna Russell Ring” finds it.

56. Brownphel @12 – thanks for triggering a memory of Will Self’s superb Umbrella, which is largely set in Friern Hospital/Colney Hatch. Maybe the subconscious recollection of that novel is why the solution came so easily (the Milton reference was totally wasted on me).

57. [I make a free-standing monthly payment to The Guardian in the expectation of nothing other than supporting the institution. I won’t say how much but in terms of the crossword’s proportion of the daily newspaper’s cover price, I reckon I cover it.

    But the fact is that the online crossword IS free at ‘face value’ – and no one is forcing those in charge to make it so.

    Let’s not even go there when it comes to the time, cost and effort to operate, administer and maintain Fifteen Squared!!]

58. Escapes and is not made to pay (4,4) I agree with our blogger that only “is not made to pay *for*” would be substitutable, e.g. in “She gets free ice cream”). (Or ‘not made to pay’ is closer to GETS *IN* FREE, such as on the last day of a test match.) But I also find Choldunk’s argument @32 compelling: GOES FREE seems too inactive for an escape. (It sounds like someone left the cell door unlocked.)

    I had GOES FREE, like several others, until it prevented GANGED going in. It seems to me now that GETS FREE fits the first definition, but GOES FREE is better with the second; neither of them matches both satisfactorily.

    To (hopefully) deflect any accusations of curmudgeonliness, I should perhaps say that the standard of clues in this crossword was pretty high, in my estimation. With so many of the words totally unfamiliar, and a difficult grid to fill in, it was important that the wordplay was accurate. So, well done again to Maskerade!

59. Nice to have a musical theme which did not require knowledge of obscure groups. SIEG for German victory gave a strong pointer on the first pass through. I was lucky to get both 10-letter answers early on, which were key for starting the fill-in, one of them because my parents happened to have a holiday in County Clare so I knew ENNIS.

60. sheffield hatter@52
    I hadn’t seen your comment when I posted my 55. If Wagner described Das Rheingold as a kind of intro what’s it doing at the end? The instructions may not say that the parts are in order but it would seem to be a fair assumption in the absence of anything to the contrary.

61. [Pino @55: Anna Russell is wonderful, and I have yet to find a Wagner devotee who doesn’t love her brilliant humorous take on the Ring. She is deliciously irreverent but knows her stuff right down to the last detail. Probably the best bit is when, after describing a somewhat far-fetched plot point (the bit about the love potion, I think), she says “I’m not making this up, you know!” She sings bits of the music – including some of the parts for men – and I swear she’s better than some of the “real” singers I have heard!]

62. Pino@60 you make a very good point, if Das Rheingold is not part of the ring cycle ( and I accept this from people who know a lot more than me ) then it should not be in the perimeter at all, certainly not at the END.
    I think we just have a genuine glitch with instructions here, it is hard to claim no order is implied when we are given a specified starting point.
    Fortunately I wrote a few perimeters out on paper before entering the correct one in the actual grid.
    For me I must stress it did not spoil the overall enjoyment , this was the best “special” for a very long time.

63. Thanks Maskarade and mhl.
    It has all been said, I think. I like the way Maskarade chooses words such that, even when you have lots of crossers in place, there is still some ambiguity about where to fit them in the jigsaw (eg BURGUNDY and BARMAIDS). Thanks also to Google for the assistance.

64. I amazingly managed to finish this. Last one in was FRIERN, which I hope we can all agree was massively unfair to overseas solvers. For the other two obscure bits of British geography, he at least told us what part of the map to stare at.

    I’m a decently accomplished Wagner fan, but I still needed a list of Ring characters to get four or five of the more obscure ones. I will say that being told in advance that the operas’ titles were along the perimiter helped massively with placing the answers.

    Our bank holiday is this weekend, so I’m stuck watching the US Open with no complicated crossword to distract me.

65. Not sure why there is any expectation that a UK newspaper crossword setter should have to ‘think international’ in their clueing, although I would agree that Friern Barnet is the other end of the scale!

66. Pino @60. It’s not at the end – it’s before the beginning!

67. Having over 20 recordings of the Ring, I did not need to look any names up. I got Wotan and then headed back for confirmations and then started in roughly the right places alphabatically for suitable clues. I think I was looking for Siegmund and realised that Siegrune made more sense then, having seen her name, I was able to dredge up from memory another couple of Valkyrie names on top of her and Brunnhilde and Waltraute who are also Valkyries but appear elsewhere in the Ring too and therefore are not so obscure.

    I’m in the camp who believe that the Ring starts with Das Rheingold. I think the instructions were meant to say enter from the top right and there was a slip along the way. All the explanations about Rheingold being a Vorabend are rationalisations after the fact and just confirm that it really does begin Rheingold. They also require far too much specific knowledge to be fair as clues in a general magazine. If the crossword appeared in Opera magazine it might be fair to use such a sophistic trick but not in a general newspaper where many of those doing the crossword would not know the theme. But as I said I think it was a slip to mention the bottom. If a fair hint was not intended, then it would have been better for the starting position not to be mentioned

    I had enough answers to position the 10-letter answers but not enough to expand out from them to the edge and eventually resorted to the three letter answers which I had been avoiding because I knew that there was a split 6-letter word

68. It may not have been everyone’s cup of magic potion, but I had a lovely afternoon solving and fitting it all together, and I doff my metaphorical cap to the sheer technical wizardry of the construction.

    I believe it may in fact be the second appearance of NANTWICH in one of Maskarade’s bank holiday specials in the space of twelve months. Doubtless as amusing and joyful to him in execution as it is to me in recognition, being the modest but historic little town in which he endeavoured to teach me German and French nearly forty years ago.

69. Peter C @67 I think the instructions were meant to say enter from the top right and there was a slip along the way. This doesn’t seem very likely to me, because “top right” does not accurately describe the square where Das Rheingold starts. It is, if anything, “right top”: the rightmost topmost square, or the top square of the farthest right column, and this very difficulty (and the anticipated arguments it would provoke among solvers, sadly) seems to me the reason why Maskarade chose to describe the start point as the more easily-defined bottom right. It would have tickled him, I think, that it could be justified by the three operas being preceded by the prelude. 🙂

    Quite apart from this, when solving I soon saw that starting with Das Rheingold in the bottom right would not work (because it results in the non-words KLA on the left and MME on the right), so I looked instead at where EIN and DEI could usefully be placed, as several other commenters have mentioned. Clearly the answer EIN would form part of RhEINgold going down the right, and DEI makes the last three letters of SiegfrIED when going up the left.

    Perhaps (as you suggested yourself, Peter C) Maskarade should have just said that “the four parts making up the theme appear clockwise around the perimeter”, without defining a starting point!

70. This was a magnificent puzzle and I am in total admiration of the skill of the setter in producing it to fit in so superbly. My wife and I completed it – she is the music buff.
    I have read most of these comments and am surprised that nobody (as far as I picked up) has commented on the entry of the answer “Ring Cycle” into the grid. This was a single clue with a two-word answer (as was “Ab Initio”). I thought such answers take a single place on a grid – as Ab Initio does.
    An indication that one of the two-word answers was split would have been clearer.
    But this is a very minor grumble for such a superb puzzle.

71. WynnD @70, I had no problems with RING CYCLE as two lights because having counted the numbers of clues and lights of each word length (I always do this with jigsaws before starting to fill the grid), I knew that we had a 6 split into two 3s and a 9 that had to be 4 and 5 – nothing else would have added up, and none of the other 9-letter clues produced anything that split nicely.

72. I’m finding the comments above about the order of the 4 perimeter parts interesting but quite academic. The instructions did not say explicitly the parts were in order, and I myself did not know the order, but just fitted them in in the spirit of the jigsaw. Given EIN and DEI as the embedded 3-letter words, and that the parts did not all have the same length, there was only one way to put them in, especially given that an arbitrary one of them had to start at the bottom right. Everything else then followed in a fairly straightforward manner, with only minor trial-and-error.

    I would agree that having the 4 parts in chronological order would be the icing on the cake, but the cake was pretty fine already.

73. I started this then forgot about it until the next Saturday, and gave up with a few clues yet to solve. I wouldn’t have gotten FRIERN in a month of Saturdays, for example. ‘Bottom right-hand square’ was a bit ambiguous in a grid with the corners cut off, and I would have been stuck trying to start around the outside with DAS RHEINGOLD, which is the first opera. In fact I’ve just noticed that the operas are in the right order starting in one of the top right-hand squares, not the bottom as in the instructions. I now feel glad that I didn’t waste any more time on this.

74. This was challenging but fun. I live in Norfolk by the A47, the road to King’s Lynn, so that confused me briefly. Also wasted time with bedheads and bedposts before the bolsters came to mind. No real knowledge of the theme meant finding a character list online, but eventually around 4pm Sunday it all fell into place

75. I thought this was brilliant – loved it. Got the theme pretty quickly, but had to look up the characters as confess I am not a fan. With that and the individual titles, plus positioning of the 3 letter solutions, it made filling the grid easier than many jigsaws. Also solved vast majority before even trying to fill in the grid. Only real hang up was Friern as had never heard of the place so had to look up all the possible options. Thanks to both Maskerade and mhl for a great puzzle and a clear blog. Also to several of the commenters for additional clarification.

76. One thing that hasn’t been mentioned but a friend of mine has pointed out. The reason that the Ring of opera names are put in starting where they do is so that the first four letters on the top row spell out ERDA, another character in the cycle

77. I too was initially puzzled by placing the perimeter operas, and even, as the theme was Ring Cycle (not the German original) tried the English versions – coincidentally 46 letters too if as Rhinegold, The Valkyrie, Siegfried, and Twilight of the Gods – before the three letter words made all clear…

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