August and early September is the time when school starts again and when we get swamped with advertisements of special offers for school supplies. We only need to take the list of school supplies that the school sent us in advance and go to one of the many local stores or supermarkets to buy the necessary supplies. In Early Modern Iceland, however, the situation was different.
In connection with the royal Danish Ordinance concerning the Reformation, the governor of Iceland Poul Huitfeldt (c. 1520–92) ruled in 1552 that the bishops must supply pupils in need with books and paper. Although is not specified where other pupils were to get their paper from, we do have some information on paper sale concerning the two schools in Hólar in the North and Skálholt in the South in the seventeenth century.
In a letter from 1666, Bishop of Hólar Gísli Þorláksson (1631–84) notes that parents have to supply their children with paper. At that time there was a trade monopoly in Iceland, which was in the hands of merchants from Copenhagen. Approx. twenty trade posts were around the country, with Hofsós closest to Hólar. We can assume that parents were able to get some paper from these trading posts (see our blog post from July about the import of paper in 1635). Bishop Gísli presumably had his own international trade networks, however, and must have been able to secure paper for his own needs through that network.
In Skálholt there was a noteworthy incident around Christmas in 1652, when Jón Pálsson stole paper and sold it to fellow schoolmates. We have a list with the names of these twenty-three pupils, including the amount of paper they purchased from Jón. To hear more about this case, come to our conference “Paper Stories” 7–8 May 2020 in Reykjavík!
Thank you, Hjalti Snær Ægisson and Gunnar Marel Hinriksson, for alerting me to the paper theft case!
Further reading:
Vol. 12 of Diplomatarium Islandicum. Íslensk fornbréfasafn, ed. Páll Eggert Ólason. Reykjavík: Félagsprentsmiðja, 1923–32.
Reykjavík, The Árni Magnússon Instititute for Icelandic Studies, AM 268 fol.
Gísli Þorláksson: Prestastefnudómar og bréfabók Gísla biskups Þorlákssonar, ed. Bjarni Vilhjálmsson and Júníus Kristinsson. Reykjavík : Þjóðskjalasafn Íslands, 1983.