Interview with a Nord Papermaker

To learn about the history of paper, I traveled to Riften and sought out the Yellowbark Papermaker, a small workshop outside of the city where most of the city's paper is made. There I met Honthjolf, the owner and grandson of the founder of the workshop.

Can you tell me a little about what your product is used for?

H: We produce a range of high quality and low quality paper sheets, from the kind used to make books and scrolls to the disposable sanitary napkins and toilet paper. Butchers use mid-grade paper sheets to roll up their products, and almost everyone around here keeps an accounts ledger that was produced in my workshop here. I know it’s not the dainty Cyrodiilic process, but it’s the only thing that works this far north.

What’s the main component in the paper?

H: The paper is a mixture of pulps coming from the dung of horses and cows, the husks of vegetables and hay, and sawdust and tree bark pulp. The number one component by far is the mammoth dung.

You use mammoth droppings to make books and scrolls?

H: Mammoth droppings mixed with hay and vegetable rinds and sawdust, yes.

Can you explain the process in a little more detail?

H: Well, the first thing is collecting the mammoth droppings and converting them into balls of string, like this. [He hands me a melon-sized, light and odorless pellet.] Most people can only collect the droppings in the summer and early fall, but I hear some men in the north of Falkreath operate all year round. What’s best is when folks get mammoths walking across their yards and roads and dropping scat, then they’ll pay us to go collect this valuable commodity. Summer is the peak operating season, and smart men focus this time to make their entire workshops focus on producing vast hordes of these balls of string. This way, even though they can’t collect dung in the winter, they’ll have enough to ration out a supply of paper to their buyers until the land thaws.

H: The dung, before it arrives at the workshop, has to be sun-dried then washed twice. Then it arrives pretty much odorless where we remove any debris like rocks or leaves then boil it for a morning or an afternoon. The waste water is valuable fertilizer, and I have a contract with the city of Riften to spread some of it on the public flower beds. The contract’s not worth much, but you should see how much the flowers love it.

H: After the string soup has been boiled off a number of times, we mix and add pulps from different sources, like hay and sawdust and birch bark. This is the point it gets so thick we can form them into those balls. The balls are made into paper by spreading them out in water. You take a screen in a vat of water and break up the ball until it’s an even consistency in the frame, then evenly raising the screen and setting it out to dry.

How old is this workshop?

H: This one was built pretty recently, about 4e18, by my grandfather who had apprenticed in the much older Solitude workshop. He wanted to provide work for the destitute masses stumbling away from the horrors in Morrowind. For many years the vast number of my father’s laborers were Dunmer refugees.

Do your men enjoy their work?

H: Well, I think the ones who clean the raw poo tend to grumble the most, but I pay them the most, and everyone gets paid more than a farmhand, so I don’t think they have too much to complain about. It’s an honest job for honest money, and a lot of men and elves these days are looking for no more trouble than that. Paper is in high demand.

The civil war hasn’t hurt your sales?

H: Hurt my sales?? I’ve never been selling so much. The Stormcloaks are eating through my supply as fast as I can produce it. I would be making more money if I canceled my existing contracts and sold exclusively to them, but of course I would never do that. Still, they’re buying up all the fresh paper I can produce. One soldier who stopped by to place an order bragged that it was a countermeasure against the Imperial traitors and their Thalmor puppeteers. Besides making propaganda, they needed sealed orders which they could put to the torch at the first sign of ambush. The theory was, this would give the Thalmor no hope of extracting information by torturing prisoners of war. I don't know about all that, but I'm pretty sure the Imperials are buying just as much from workshops out east.

Moving on, what’s the history of your trade?

H: As far as I understand it, this process of turning dung into paper was first developed under the Dragon Priests, but then forgotten until the Cyrodiilic process was introduced in conjunction with the saw mills. Then, when demand far outpaced supply, people looked elsewhere until the old system was stumbled upon again. I don’t know how much of this is true, because my grandfather told me this, and he also told me that Moth Priests were just people who tried to understand pages made of dragon dung.