I was once asked why there have been no paper mills in Iceland. I started explaining that there was hardly any linen clothing available, that the rivers were either too shallow or too rapid to power a paper mill, that there was neither the necessary knowledge nor financial capital available. The slightly startled inquirer replied with another question: “So, it was not because there are no trees in Iceland?!” This led me to reflect on our knowledge of the material(s) that paper is made of.
Modern paper is made of tree, or rather cellulose fibres from wood, as well as recycled paper. And since there are no trees in Iceland, paper cannot be produced except from recycled paper, just as my inquirer assumed.
Paper made of cellulose from wood is, however, a rather new invention in the long history of paper. Friedrich Gottlob Keller from Germany invented the wood pulp process in 1843, and had it patented two years later. In 1852 it was re-patented by Heinrich Voelter, who developed industrial machines for papermaking. At the same time but independently from Keller/Voelter, Charles Fenerty from Nova Scotia produced ground-wood paper in North America. Hugh Burgess and Charles Watt were granted a patent for their chemical process of making paper from wood fibre in the USA in 1854.
Before that, in the western hemisphere paper was usually made of rags, linen clothing too worn to be worn. The term ‘rag paper’ (and ‘Hadernpapier’ or ‘Lumpenpapier’ in German) refers to this. Presumably, linen originally denoted tabby weave cloth, and often it was made of flax or hemp, while cotton played only a minor role. Collecting rags for paper mills was strictly regulated with ordinances or royal privileges in the early modern period. Illegal and international rag trading, for example from England to France, could not be stopped by such rules, though. Rag-collectors were often women from the margins of society, invalid or sick and poor, and their work was gruesome and detrimental to health.
Similar to people today knowing about paper made of trees, people in the past knew about paper made of rags. There are a number of poems from Renaissance England that deal with or mention rags or flax and even linseed oil in connection with paper and writing, proving that the knowledge of rags as raw material for paper was well-known.
Do you know of similar poems from Iceland?
Further Reading
Dard Hunter, Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft. NY: Dover, 1978.
Sandra Schultz: Papierherstellung im deutschen Südwesten: Ein neues Gewerbe im späten Mittelalter. Material Text Cultures 18. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018.
Joshua Calhoun: The Nature of the Page: Poetry, Papermaking, and the Ecology of Texts in Renaissance England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020.