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The Merchants of Middle-earth

© Michael Martinez

Every now and then someone asks whether money was used in Middle-earth. It's hard to find evidence of money in The Lord of the Rings but there are some references to it. When Gandalf arrived in Hobbiton with a wagon-load of fireworks for Bilbo and Frodo's last birthday party together, Hobbit children followed him to Bag End hoping for some advance goodies. But instead Bilbo gave away a few pennies and sent the children on their ways. Gaffer Gamgee also notes that Bilbo is free with "his money" while talking with friends in a local inn.. Tolkien goes on to say in "Three Is Company" that Frodo purchases a house at Crickhollow between Brandy Hall and Newbury in the Buckland. Frodo later sells Bag End to the Sackville-Baggins family, the pestering cousins who for long had hoped to inherit Bilbo's fortune and residence before Bilbo adopted Frodo. Money comes up again when all the horses and ponies are stolen from Barliman Butterbur's stable in Bree. He pays Merry 18 silver pennies to compensate him for the loss of the Hobbit's ponies and purchases a pony from Bill Ferny for another 12 silver pennies, 3 times what the pony was worth. After this point, the Hobbits and the companions they gather are provided with supplies and transportation by the various peoples who help them, so money becomes a very transparent device for the rest of the story. Pennies are an 8th century Anglo-Saxon coinage modelled on the contemporary but slightly older Frankish denier. Offa, King of Mercia, expanded penny production after he conquered the Kingdom of Kent, which had begun minting pennies around 765. The ancient pennies were thus unlike today's pennies. They were made of silver and were the staple coin of the Anglo-Saxon realms from the 8th century onward, much as the solidus had been the staple coin of the Roman empire centuries before. Pennies replaced an older coin, called a sceat, which was used in commerce between the Anglo-Saxons and Scandinavians (the Anglo-Saxons' close relatives). Just prior to The Lord of the Rings' publication J.R.R. Tolkien was forced to condense the extensive material he had prepared for the appendices. Among the excluded passages which were only published in The Peoples of Middle-earth was a brief but fascinating section detailing the names of money used in Gondor. The tharni, we are told, was a silver coin, the fourth part of a castar. The tharni may thus have been equivalent to the silver pennies of Eriador.

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