That's exactly what occured to me the other day, when I was watching _The Name of the Rose_ again. Remember the hunchbacked monk Salvatore and the language he used? With his heretical contacts with Cathars, dabbling with black magic, his use of all languages at once, and not understading much of it all - he would be an ideal author of the VMS (had he really existed - or maybe Ecco based this character on someone quite real?).