Huginn and Muninn — thought and memory — were the two ravens Odin sent out across the world each morning to bring news of it back to him by nightfall. In the Eddic poem Grímnismál, Odin confesses he fears more for the return of Muninn — memory — than of Huginn — thought: a fitting anxiety for anyone who trusts things to the page. We took the name because that is roughly what writing is — a thought sent out, and memory made to keep it. An ink house could do worse for a patron pair.
Ours is a small bench in the Carolina Piedmont, run closer to a conservation lab than a kitchen: a precision scale, a borosilicate carboy, a calibrated pH meter, stainless throughout. We make three inks that have been made, in roughly this way, for centuries — the inks of scriptoria, archives, and the chancery: iron gall, walnut hull, and lampblack.
We don't pretend. Green Aleppo oak galls — Quercus infectoria — come from Themazi in Turkey, at origin in the galls' native region, the same species used in iron gall ink for some eight hundred years. Carbon pigment comes from Kremer Pigmente in Bavaria, the standard for fine-art conservation. We gather black walnut hulls each October from partner trees in Franklin and Wake counties. Everything else is mixing — slowly, by hand, in batches of about ninety bottles.
Then we bottle in apothecary glass, seal each cap with poured wax, number the labels by hand, and post them. We quarantine every batch for fourteen days and test it in three pens before it earns a label. We tell you what's in the bottle, where it came from, and what it can and can't do. That discipline is the brand. The price, when there is one, is what hand-made and genuinely small actually costs.