According to Yanin and Zaliznyak, most documents are ordinary letters by various people written in what is considered to be a vernacular dialect. The letters are of a personal or business character. A few documents include elaborate obscenities. Very few documents are written in Church Slavonic and only one in Old Norse. The school exercises and drawings by a young boy named Onfim have drawn much attention.[32][33][34] Since the manuscripts were written by laypeople and consist of casual notes, it has been suggested that there was widespread literacy across large segments of urban society in medieval Russia; according to one estimate, 20% of the urban male population in Russian city-states were literate around the mid-13th century.[35]

The contents of the birch bark writings included not only religious writings but also document death of princes, conclusions of peace, dignitary arrivals, folk verses and local proverbs, even casual doodles. While legal related matters include accusations, witnesses and the procedure of evidence, payments and fines, theft, fraud as well as wife-beating. One mundane personal writing reads "Sell the house and come to Smolensk or Kiev; bread is cheap; if you cannot come, write to me about your health".[36]

[–] Wrufieotnak@feddit.org 10 points 1 month ago (1 children)

In a museum they told me that using birch as writing material seriously impacted how the Novgorod region was seen as illiterate in the beginning. I was told that since they initially didn't find a lot of writing, they thought only the highest society could write. Then they found the birch letters and realised that most of the writing simply didn't survive because birch is bad for long term keeping. And since even children's letter were then found, they did a 180 on the assessment and concluded that literacy was very widespread instead.

[–] antonim@lemmy.world 6 points 1 month ago

Evidently the birch was actually really good for preservation, in combination with the swamp(like?) terrain – the birch bark sunk into the ground with no oxygen to rot it away. And they're still finding new ones, I saw news about a new batch just a few months ago.