Quote:
Originally Posted by Zigûr
Is there the possibility of a "Common Currency", perhaps like the Common Speech, in the West? I am imagining something of Númenórean origin which would have been used in lands under the influence of both Arnor and Gondor. Mordor tried to buy horses from Rohan as well - perhaps it was even adopted by Orcish realms in their dealings with their allies and each other.
I wonder if it's telling in the fact that Frodo did not bring a great deal of money with him in his departure from the Shire despite his desperate situation - the fact that so much of Eriador (and, perhaps, the West in general) was depopulated, uninhabited wilderness it can account somewhat for the ambiguous status of money. I wonder how much an event like the recovery of Erebor would have affected things?
Here's something from The Peoples of Middle-earth, a digression from the word for 'quarter', tharantīn:
"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)." (p.45)
I suppose we can never know if a tharni of Gondor was equivalent to a silver penny as used in the Shire and the Bree-land though...
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More likely the penny was eqivalent to the
castar what with the whole "four" thing (the silver pennies of the middle ages usually had a large cross as part of the design of the back to make it easier to cut the coin in half and "fourthings" much has the spanish 8 real piece was cut into up to 8 "bits" (or where we get the term "two bits" for a quarter dollar)
As for the original question the answer is, quite possibly, or at least a lot of the coins would be issued to be more or less the same sort of sizes and weights. Coins that are seen as being "solid" often become trade standards, and eventually get adopted by other countries. The British penny was originally based on the Roman
denarius or 10
as peice which was the standard silver exchange coin of Rome (that's why the old symbol for penny was "d") The shilling was based on the
solidus (originally a gold coin weighing about 4.5 grams) as was the old frech Sou (the "/" was orignally a long "s") the pound was just that orginally the value of one pound of silver hence the "L" (for lirbrum). Other exples would be the british florin (2 shilling piece) the dutch ducat, and the dollar (orignally a german coin called a Joachimsthaler, later shortened to "Thaler")