Writing Materials for Elves

cycas:

Paper, parchment, wax, bark, wood, bone, papyrus, slate, charcoal, chalk, pencils, ink.

Paper:
Real-world paper is a Chinese invention, so if you are aiming for a pseudo-European feel, it might not seem quite right.  But silk is Chinese too, so if your Elves are clad in silk, there’s no reason they should not write on paper. (and Middle-earth isn’t really Fantasy Europe)  Paper is an old technology so it should not automatically ‘feel wrong’ and we still use it, so probably you have an instinctive feel for how it works: that you can tear it, scrumple it, burn it, make it into scrolls and books.  

It’s easy to write elves as having paper, but maybe you feel it seems a bit too familiar…?

Parchment
This stuff is basically a kind of pale rawhide.  Has a strong medieval vibe, though it’s much older than that. It lasts a long time and is really tough, so might be a good choice for someone wanting to keep very long-lasting records.  It’s beautiful and it’s expensive, and it’s very very strong.   The best-quality kind, made from young animals, is called vellum.  Personally, I like to think of elves as the kind of people who don’t routinely slaughter lambs and calves for their skins, so I tend to think if they used parchment at all, it probably came from older animals, and they were quite careful with it.  You can re-use parchment by scrubbing the ink off and writing on it again: that’s how tough it is.  So you can correct mistakes made on parchment, though it’s work.  Given the way it’s made, probably anyone writing on parchment is going to draft out the document on some less permanent medium before they write it on something so tough and valuable. Probably for books or law records rather than letters.

It’s NOT paper.  It’s not going to scrumple up or tear like paper does, and if you burn it, it’s going to take a while to burn, and it will probably stink.    

Wax
THE popular temporary writing surface of the ancient world tends to get forgotten now, but if your writer is drafting out a difficult letter or making notes to be written out later in fair on good paper or parchment, this might be what he’d use.  You get a flat wax surface which can easily be erased and you write on it with a simple stylus.  You don’t need ink, you are essentially scratching letters into the wax.  You can squish the wax around if you make a mistake to erase it.  Your tablet probably has a gorgeous ornate cover which folds, so you don’t accidentally lose your notes.

Downsides: given that ‘tablet’ and ‘stylus’ now have very modern equivalents, you probably need to emphasise that it’s a wax tablet and a lead stylus when you write about it in fic, not that your elves have suddenly all got Ipads.

Bark
Another old technology – at least 2000 years old, and I think this one feels nicely elven. Birchbark can be harvested without doing a lot of harm to the tree, and it’s relatively easy to harvest a lot of it, just with a sharp blade: it needs less complex manufacture than either parchment or paper. Birches like relatively exposed, relatively northern climates, so this is a good fit for Beleriand.

You can write on it with anything you’d use to write on paper, such as ink, or you can scratch stuff directly into the bark, like six-year-old Onfim of Novgorod did back in 1260AD.

It’s probably going to be a little stiff to scrumple, and probably a bit harder to tear than paper, but elves can probably rip up thinner sheets and they can certainly fling it on the fire in a dramatic manner and it will burn very nicely.

Wood
It’s a lot of work to mince up wood fibres into a mush and then roll it out into paper.  Why not instead simply carve wood into thin slices and write on that?  This was a technology much used in the Roman Empire; the surviving writings from Hadrian’s wall are written on wood tablets in ink. Holly is a nice dense fast-growing and very pale wood, which might be particularly suited to use by the Noldor in Beleriand.  Instead of sending someone an entire plank of wood, send them a set of thin tablets sewn together with thread.  Perhaps you’ll have a unique signature knot, or seal your letter-knot with beeswax and a signet ring, so that you know nobody else has read it.

Scrumpling is probably out, but this stuff is likely to be cheap and it will burn well, so feel free to fling it on the fire!

Bone
Bone is nice and pale, but it’s more of a pain to carve into strips than wood is, and I think has a slightly menacing feel.  Still, it seems like the perfect surface for necromancers to write spells on, and like wood, you can bore holes in it with an awl and stitch the strips of bone together to make a longer document that can be folded or rolled up.

Papyrus
This stuff has a very long history in Egypt of course, and makes a very durable kind of thick paper, as long as it’s kept dry.  The papyrus reed is a hot-weather plant and papyrus scrolls, like paper, aren’t so tough in damp environments, so this one might be good for southern Avari elves to use, or perhaps southern Numenorean bases, or other Men of the South.

Slate
This dark stone splits into smooth flat pieces easily and can be written on with chalk. It does crack very easily though, and perhaps has a less ‘ancient world’ feel to it as a writing substance than most of the previous options. Possibly suitable for notes, and for learning the alphabet, but it’s easier to preserve notes on a wax tablet than in chalk on a slate. Scratching messages on stone in general has a very long history, and is canon for Lord of the Rings!  

Probably not so good for letters that need to move from place to place, and definitely not so good for scrumpling or burning, though you could fling a slate dramatically out of a window and smash it, I suppose.

Charcoal
As a writing material, I always feel that the sheer ephemeral nature of charcoal can’t be overstated.  It’s widely available, true: pick it out of any fireplace or bonfire –  but as a writing/drawing material, it comes off almost as easily as it goes on. Good for quickly drawing secret maps that you want to be able to wipe out again.

Chalk
Like charcoal, crumbly and ephemeral.  So very ephemeral. Depending on the geology, your elves might be able to pick it up on any stony surface, or there might be none of it about for leagues and leagues.

Ink
Sooooo many kinds of ink.  You might imagine elves writing with dip-pens, but the fountain pen is an earlier technology than you might think: in the real world, it was invented in Egypt over a thousand years ago.  

We mostly tend to think of ink as a liquid now, but solid ink-sticks are still used, made from a mix of different kinds of soot (pine wood soot or charcoal) with a glue to hold them together: you grind them on an inkstone then add water.  Perhaps the Falmari might use pinewood soot ink-sticks bound with fish-glue, and mixed with pearl-dust? And the Doriathrim might use egg-glue inksticks made with charcoal.

The mining Noldor might use ferrous salts with oak-galls to make their ink: it perhaps is fitting that iron-gall inks, though very clear and effective at first, over a long period of time corrode the writing surface.