Quills and Pens in the Magical World

Quills

The use of quills for writing is another seemingly deliberately antiquated choice made by the wizarding world. While the quill would be a common writing instrument in non-magical Europe until the early 1800s,¹ they were the common writing utensil, whereas the wizarding world seems to have particularly chosen the more exclusive parchment as its writing surface.

Some writers have speculated that the reason for the sustained use of the quill may be magical in nature. That the quill may channel the writer’s magic in some way that matters when writing on magical topics.² If this is true, then the magical population of China, Japan, and similar cultures where writing with brushes is common must have precise and magical requirements for the nature of the brushes used when writing on these topics. This is not impossible, as the traditional brushes used are usually made of bamboo with natural fibers, generally animals' hair, for the bristles.³

The counterargument is the lack of variety. Matching a user to a wand requires a range of wood types and at least 3 types of core materials to embed within that wood.⁴

Dip Pens

For whatever reason, it occurred to me to look up the steel nibbed dip pens that predated fountain pens, wondering when in non-magical (actual) history pens started to replace the use of quills. I was really quite surprised. Apparently pens go way back, the Wikipedia article was very Britain centric (which is actually fine for my purposes), but apparently our earliest pen (a copper one) dates from around 410, just as the Romans were pulling out of Britain.⁵ It does not come out and state it, but my guess is that for a long time fine metal work was really expensive, so, as I said, quills remain the standard writing utensil until the mass production of steel pens in 1822.[^200816-5]
Interestingly, according to the article, these type of pens are still favoured over fountain pens for calligraphy and other artistic works that require precision and varied thicknesses.⁶

From this I can draw a couple of conclusions. Magical users would dislike fountain pens, because they seem drawn to multi-coloured inks (which are more difficult with fountain pens), and because arts like ancient runes would need much the same precision that writing calligraphy does. The dip pen on the other hand, should show no marked difference from a quill for writing your runes. Both would be substandard to a brush - there is a reason that Chinese and Japanese languages are painted, not written when you look at the really fancy stuff. The dip pen could further be engraved with runes. In the books you see spell correcting quills, and others with anti-cheating charms. I can see both of these being done more reliably with runes. You want a dicto-quill?
Again, you can see how this can be reproduced.

Moreover, magical users are clearly drawn to the aesthetic quality of a fancy feather. Fountain pens can be artistic, but are generally fairly utilitarian. Your dip pen on the other hand could be a work of art. I did a quick Google search on “steel nib feather” for example, and you can just imagine a wizard using many of those.

The Right Tools

Given that magical culture favors parchment, you would then want writing utensils that work well on it. While I can’t speak to how a fountain pen or ball point pen might work on parchment, a quill or dip pen should both work equally well on any decent quality paper. While at least one author has solved this by saying that magic is disrupted by the inorganic materials in pens, but flows into one’s writing when using a quill,⁷ there is no canonical basis for this line of thought; it is pure speculation.