Economic questions

Faelivrin

Well-Known Member
The question came up if the Edain will have coin money and I figure it’s best to start a new thread.


but they very soon come into the service of the noldor... they become soldiers, get outfitted, even live in the elven fortresses or their proximity. What they get from the elves... i doubt they have money, they get lands and elvish luxury goods.
That’s a good point. Coinage is a fairly modern (well, modern from a ‘within the entire scope of human history’ point of view, and since this entire story is taking place in a hazy prehistorical age, it would make sense for them not to have coins, even if anyone decides to give anyone some kind of currency.
There are references to metal coins, but I think only in Third Age Gondor and Eriador. They must go back to the Realms in Exile, and maybe late Numenor, but not necessarily any earlier.

The First Age Edain surely wouldn’t have coins at first, when they arrive in Beleriand, unless they can plausibly get them from trade with Longbeards. I get the impression that Valinorean Elves had a post-scarcity gift economy with no money. What about in Beleriand during the war with Morgoth? Did shell or metal money get invented eventually, or was it all barter and unquantified treasure? Metal coins seem like either a Dwarven or a Noldorin invention.
 
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Whatever the Noldor adopt, the Edain would probably copy. That’s all I can really say except that the Edain probably have at least a barter system in place.
 
Well there are no early quendian or Quenya words for coin and money, but such words do appear in Sindarin and early noldorin.However all more developed eldarin languages, including Quenya have words for merchant and trade.

As Jrrt does not give us more detail on the history of money i try to reconstruct from the few facts we have and to me the most likely scenario is that elves, even in aman have at last some degree of trade and barter or exchange but no system of coinage or wages or prices or economic value. Such concepts may have come up in beleriand and trade between two such different cultures such as sindar, noldor , dwarves and orcs seems like a scenario in which a thing like coinage could come up.

Sadly we do not know much about dwarvish language and if they had coinage or words for coins,but sindarin words like mirian, canath and tharni point towards materials and divisions. Interestingly mirian does not refer to any sort of metal but to a word for "treasure, jewel, precious thing".

Therefore my theory is: the first coins came up as a sort of medals, tokens, amulets, signs, and giveaways and likely were metal-plates adorned with gems - most likely invented by dwarves or noldor... but out of the necessity for smaller units of coinage these plates by time became smaller coins (still a silverpenny and silverquarter are quite valuable coins... i mean 1 silverpenny is 1/3 pony/smallhorse!).
 
I would think that dwarves would be the most motivated to develop a system of currency to facilitate trade with others, particularly non-dwarves. But it could be the Edain, if we need it to be.

Mostly in the First Age, we see payments in goods, not coins. Eöl purchases Nan Elmoth with a sword. The dwarfmade dragon-helm passes through many different hands as a gift (for some reason). The Fëanoreans have horses that the host of Fingolfin does not. Finrod has treasures which he presumably uses to help build Nargothrond. Etc. So, there is talk of payment, but not really talk of money.

But if we want to show a chest of treasure changing hands at some point, that could be thought to be coins....

The real issue is that in day-to-day life, apparently no one is buying and selling much of anything. If there's a market, it seems to still be on the barter system?

I know that we shied away from introducing coins in Valinor. We can have them in First Age Beleriand, and we'll need to have them in Numenor.
 
Historically day-to-day goods were rather seldon paid with coins, at last in antiquity. Because metal coins were very valuable and you do not pay your bread or beer with big metal outside of d&d land...

Most Coins either acted as big-money, like our modern day banknotes or had a function like credit cards... if you show you have em, you show youre solvent.

So, i say dwarves and noldor invent money, but it does not play a big role until the second age, and in beleriand we still have "proto-money", tokens i call it.
 
That does mean what? Some cultures had ingot-money or torque-shaped money. It is still money. And iron

-bar money also is nothing you carry around with you in your moneybag to buy bread at the baker...
it is a currency to pay big expenses.
 
That does mean what? Some cultures had ingot-money or torque-shaped money. It is still money. And iron

-bar money also is nothing you carry around with you in your moneybag to buy bread at the baker...
it is a currency to pay big expenses.
It was an example of a society that didn’t use coins.
 
It is still not very different from coins... coins are just smaller and more easily to transport and hide. It is one really big iron ingot = ca. 1 small gold coin or four big silver coins if you trade it. Basically you're paying with raw unmanufactured material.
 
Coins strictly speaking means the round ones that you can fit several of in a pocket. But more broadly speaking "coin" can include many different shapes of metal currencies that had fixed weights and values, issued and marked by a government: spade, knife, square, bar, and ingot shapes have all been used.

Shell money (which I imagine the Sindar having) is distinct in that it can't be monopolized by a government mint. Anyone who can find the shells can cut them to the required shapes. With dentalium, fishing for the shells is quite a lot of work, but any type of seawater shell would really be available only from the Falathrim, no matter how scarce or abundant the shellfish was.

I have thought that the Sindarin words for coins were actually Numenorean Sindarin words, not words that dated all the way back to Beleriand. I could be wrong though.

I imagine that when Finrod hands over treasure to the Dwarves, it will be in the form of ingots of various sizes, worked and unworked gems, jewelry, cups, etc. Nothing in standardized sizes and shapes with fixed values, just piles of shiny stuff.


Aside from shell money and minted metal money/coins, there's also commodity money, in which a particular luxury good that can be counted easily, becomes legal tender. In Mesoamerica cocoa beans were legal tender (and people counterfeited them!). Fine textiles have also been used.

And then in entirely moneyless societies, there's just no standard measurement with which to "count" value and compare two goods numerically. Goods are exchanged by barter, for other goods but also for future favors owed, or for social prestige.
 
Middle earth economics is a hard question. I'm having a hard time writing more without sounding negative or dismissive, when that's not how I actually feel. How about this: I feel like the effort it would take to come up with a good economic underpinning for Beleriand would probably be better spent on other parts of the story or background.
 
I guess it may be that elves work on behalf of the community (or their guild or house or household)but get their individual share and are allowed to barter with it. At least that would be a hypothesis we could work with i think. I am also against coinage in strict sense for the first age, but we can have proto-money such as ingots and medalions.
 
I wonder how their differences from Mortals affect Elven economics. I think of Aman as a post-scarcity place because it's literally Paradise and the Valar love the Eldar too much to let any of them languish in poverty, but of course Middle-earth is a place of cold and hunger and war, and other ugly things.

Nonetheless, Elves don't have to spend any time or energy being sick, getting old, caring for the sick and old, or carrying/birthing/raising babies who die before age 5. Their societies can be and are devastated by war, but seldom if ever by famine, and never by plague. Their elder generations don't have to hurry to pass on what they can to younger generations before dying. The elders keep accumulating more wisdom and experience and skill, and everyone is free to devote more their time and energy to just being alive. They don't even need as much food, clothing, shelter, or sleep as humans (though they do need some of each). They also don't have to hurry to reproduce before age 40, they can afford to wait until the right person comes into their life and they find a peaceful time to raise children. This frees them from much of the constraints and needs that drive Mortals.

So Elves are naturally less motivated by the bodily urges, as Tolkien put it: sex, food, comfort, and fear of injury and illness. Plus Elves are unfallen so they're less inclined to greed and violence (though they obviously can fall to that level!). Instead they're motivated strongly to be artistic in everything they do, and I think, to simply enjoy life. They're free to enjoy life and be happier than Mortals can ever hope to be.

How does that affect their economy? It surely makes a system like Haerangil just described easier for Elves than for Humans, even when living in rather large groups. Elves also have centuries or millennia to get to know each other, so even in a large city like Gondolin there may be far fewer strangers, and that will affect how people relate to each other. Maybe even in big cities, they can develop the kind of close-knit relationships that small hunter-gatherer clans have. The average Elf isn't strongly motivated to screw over other people to make a profit, and being long-lived they have to live with whatever they do to their environment.

They're probably also less hurried in everything that they do, because they have literally all the time in the world. Of course they can be prompt and quick when they need to (in war, or on a hunting trip, or when rescuing somebody from a frozen lake or whatever). But for example, although Calaquendi surely could have invented water-clocks, I don't think the idea of a clock would occur to an Elf. They can tell more-or-less what hour it is by the color of Tree-Light or the position of the Sun or stars. I imagine when Elves have an event, they don't have particular start or end times scheduled out, people just show up some time during that day or night, kind of whenever. I don't think they really care about precise timing for most things. If a Human showed them a clock, I imagine most Elves would just ask "But why do you care what time it is?"
 
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They're probably also less hurried in everything that they do, because they have literally all the time in the world. Of course they can be prompt and quick when they need to (in war, or on a hunting trip, or when rescuing somebody from a frozen lake or whatever). But for example, although Calaquendi surely could have invented water-clocks, I don't think the idea of a clock would occur to an Elf. They can tell more-or-less what hour it is by the color of Tree-Light or the position of the Sun or stars. I imagine when Elves have an event, they don't have particular start or end times scheduled out, people just show up some time during that day or night, kind of whenever. I don't think they really care about precise timing for most things. If a Human showed them a clock, I imagine most Elves would just ask "But why do you care what time it is?"
They're master crafters, and I would imagine there's plenty of processes that require precise timing—not least cooking :p

I can quite see some Elf becoming fêted for inventing a gadget which stopped the sticky buns burning :cool:
 
You're right that timing is important in some crafts. But real world Humans cooked and baked and fired pottery for millennia without using clocks.

I think an hourglass or time candle of some kind can serve as an egg-timer, without telling you that it's precisely 4:12 in the afternoon, Eastern Standard Time.
 
Yeah, they seem to have little love for me hanic things... probably little need to. The dwarves on the other hand seem to love some kinds of technology... i wonder at what time they come to me hanical clocks or steam engines... but they probably wouldn't share such knowledge with anyone if they had it.

The orcs of isengard abd mordor may have some technology.. but only because of their masters, where they are among themselves everything probably falls to decay..
 
Steam engines are just the sort of thing Tolkien calls a corrupt invention of Sauron. He never mentions engines except used by Dark Lords, Saruman, and Ar-Pharazon's Kingsmen. Even then engines are never depicted doing anything, so they may have been a lot less powerful than an actual steam-engine.
 
True.Saruman and Sauron and the fallen numenoreans use that sort of technology.Were not told any details on the dwarven technology, other than it seems to be some sort of" magia naturalis", but different from what the elves do.
 
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