Today, we find paper everywhere. But when did it become common in Iceland? The earliest uses of and references to paper stem from the 1420s, as I wrote in previous blog posts (here and here), but it took a long time until paper became ubiquitous.
Concerning charters, paper started to supplant parchment in the 1540s, as the historian Arna Björk Stefánsdóttir concluded. Paper usage for documents increased in the 1550s but declined in the following decade. There are references to now lost paper charters and transcripts from the late sixteenth century, but unfortunately editions of Icelandic charters end with the year 1570. Therefore, we do not know for certain when paper supplanted parchment with regard to charters.
The oldest extant paper manuscript is the notebook of Bishop Gissur Einarsson, Reykjavík, Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies AM 232 8vo from 1539-48 (approx. one century younger than the oldest paper charter). In the second half of the sixteenth century paper manuscripts increased in numbers, and towards the end of the century there were more paper manuscripts than parchment ones. It was not until the seventeenth century, though, that paper manuscripts were ubiquitous.
Although the introduction of paper was rather late in Iceland, it was not necessarily slower than in other countries. To give but one example: in England, it was introduced in the thirteenth century, it was used commonly in business and royal correspondence and increasingly in local administration in the fourteenth century, but it became commonly used for literary manuscripts only after 1400.
Another interesting question in this connection is how long it took until paper was re-used, so please watch this space for answers!
Further reading:
Arna Björk Stefánsdóttir, “Um upptöku pappírs á Íslandi á sextandu og sautjándu öld,” Sagnir 30 (2013): 226-236.
Orietta Da Rold, Paper in Medieval England: From Pulp to Fictions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.
Silvia Hufnagel, “Der Wechsel von Pergament und Wachstafeln zu Papier in Island im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert,“ Gutenberg-Jahrbuch 95 (2020): 176-191.