# Currency of Middle Earth?



## Evan Frayling

Does anyone know the names given to the major currencies of Middle-Earth?


----------



## Mike

I bet the Shire had pounds and shillings.


----------



## Ithrynluin

Well, in LOTR, when Gandalf and Bilbo are on their way to Bag End, Bilbo gives "a few pennies away" to the hobbit children who expected some fireworks to go off.

Then, in Bree, the hobbits pay twelve silver pennies for Bill the pony. Actually, "_Mr. Butterbur paid for it himself, and offered Merry another eighteen pence as some compensation for the lost animals. He was an honest man, and well-off as things were reckoned in Bree; but thirty silver pennies was a sore blow to him, and being cheated by Bill Ferny made it harder to bear._"


I had to look up what the difference is between pence and pennies - pence is the plural of penny, and so appears to be interchangeable with pennies. Not sure if pennies and silver pennies are one and the same, though.

In the dwarven-orkish Battle of Azanulbizar, the dwarves "took the head of Azog and thrust into its mouth the purse of small money." (Appendix: Durin's Folk)

And then there's this from HoME XII:



> Similarly farthing has been used for the four divisions of the Shire, because the Hobbit word tharni was an old word for 'quarter' seldom used in ordinary language, where the word for 'quarter' was tharantin 'fourth part'. In Gondor tharni was used for a silver coin, the fourth part of the castar (in Noldorin the canath or fourth part of the mirian).


----------



## Bucky

With all the distance and division of realms over said dsistance, I assume it was probably very similar to the United States in the early days prior to Abraham Lincoln printing a national currency (or, the 1850's due to the California gold rush - I forget exactly).........

Each local area had it's own currency of value to itself, but virtually worthless somewhere else, therefore gold and silver were always the throwbacks that everyone could deal with equally everywhere..


----------



## Firawyn

There would have to have been some standard. There were too many rangers, traders, and warring peoples to NOT have some standard. 

On the other hand, I would suppose that the most of Middle Earth depended on trading. Like for example, in the Hobbit, we see evidence of Mirkwood trading with the Lake-Town. 

My theory would be that they traded for the most part. Yes, Bilbo talks about a currency among the people of the Shire and Bree, but my guess is that is started as a Shire idea, since they did not go on adventures or anything of that sort, and that over time the idea spread to Bree, just because so many Hobbits did go there, but never any further. 

After the War of the Ring, I suspect that Maybe Aragorn would have spread the idea to other cultures, but really, did we ever hear Elves, Men, or Dwarves (or Orcs?), speaking of a means of currency?

Dwarves traded jewels and masonry for whatever they needed.

Men traded with other men for whatever they needed.

Elves are noted, above to have traded with the men of Lake-Town, and I'm sure we can guess that Elves traded with other elves, along with men.


----------

