The Acids that Etch Through Time
On Solstice, Thin Time, and the Making of Iron-Gall Ink
This evening, I took my daughter for a walk down through the village and out towards where the fields meet the woodland. It is almost the longest day, and the light hadn’t even begun to drain out of the sky. The clouds were very high and very white, with the combed look of a skein of yarn. The road out of the village is fringed with yellow sand, like a beach, washed out of the soil, left there by a glacier that retreated ten thousand years ago. And, by the side of that road, six or eight oak trees line the field edge.
This year, the oak apple galls are abundant. My daughter is familiar with the green, spiky, crown-like galls from the wonderfully-named wasp andricus quercuscalicis, and the hard, round marble galls made by a. kollari. But these were oak apple galls, which are soft and roughly round, with a texture and colour not unlike chestnut mushrooms, and we’d never seen so many. Recently, we read Cynthia Harnett’s wonderful book The Load of Unicorn, which weaves its story around the particularities of the book trade in medieval England, and so I could talk to her about the process of making ink for scribes writing books by hand.
We looked up a recipe; it is fairly simple. The galls need to be crushed and steeped to extract their tannins, and these are then mixed with iron sulphite (‘copperas’ or ‘coperose’ in earlier forms of English), and thickened if necessary. The resulting ink is a good dark colour, and it adheres well to parchment as well as paper. The only problem? Iron-gall ink is acidic. The reason it adheres so well is because it etches itself into the parchment. In some cases, it can corrode right through paper or parchment, consuming the very writing to which it gives form. A book written in iron-gall ink can eat its own words.
It is a wonderfully spooky, almost sinister image: manuscripts in dusty libraries quietly consumed by the sharp etching of black ink on their pages; hidden texts falling slowly back into the unknown. We were especially fascinated by the way that animals and plants play a much larger role in this dynamic than do the humans who set out to write. It is the oak tree that forms the gall; it does so in response to secretions from the wasp, which stimulate a hormonal response. Inside the gall, the wasp larvae grow, emerging from pin-prick holes. And, of course, it is cattle and sheep whose skin goes to make the parchment on which the ink writes. The resulting puzzle made me think of the structure of an Old English riddle. In the form of acidic ink, the wasp still ‘stings’ the cattle long after both are dead.
Thinking about the life bound up in inanimate objects is absolutely medieval. Writers constantly remind themselves - and us - that the page under one’s fingers was once the living hide of a beast, warm with movement; that the nib of the pen and the point of the scribe’s knife can cut - almost wound - this surface. To them, writing was not a docile human technology, but an uncanny collaboration between living and dead. As we collected oak galls - checking for the tiny pin-prick holes that meant the wasps had safely escaped - I thought about those holes as tiny portals to the past.
The summer solstice is sometimes understood as a ‘thin time’ - a time when boundaries between the here-and-now and the past, or the future, are almost see-through; a time when, traditionally, people and things might slip through from one time to another. Like those acid-etched pages, time might wear through itself. Collecting oak galls to make medieval ink, and walking back scuffling through sand laid down by a glacial moraine at the end of the last Ice Age, we could have been walking in any time.