“I need a length of rope!”
[Puts down a gold coin worth a month’s wages.]
Comment on Anon has seen it all before
Th4tGuyII@fedia.io 1 week agoExactly. You've got limited time to tell your story in a movie, so establishing a fake currency that nobody except hardcore numistatics nerds will care about is kinda pointless when everyone already understands that credits = future money.
And as you say using a real currency will at best make no sense, or at worst offend a group of people who may boycott your movie.
I image its the same reason for the Gold/Silver currency in many fantasy settings.
GraniteM@lemmy.world 1 week ago
schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
And for everything else, there is multipass.
trxxruraxvr@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I think that’s also because a couple hundred years ago practically every currency was just a certain weight of gold, silver or copper. Different coins were just an easy way to recognize the weight.
schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
Maybe we need to get some numismatics to weigh in here, but I think currency could be extremely tricky depending on where and when you were. I remember reading about medieval Italy and it seemed every city issued its own currency with different denominations, names, and weights. And even then, people would be scraping them to get some precious metals off of them, and with all those different currencies, counterfeiting must have been a real issue.
To apply this Tolkien, the Shire would probably have a different currency than even Bree, though Butterman would even take your coins from Gondor out of politeness to travelers.
trxxruraxvr@lemmy.world 1 week ago
They would all have different coins, but the actual value of those coins was determined by their weight, so as long as you could verify that it didn’t matter much. Scraping worked because not every salesperson would check the weight of the coins.
schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
Are you spitballing like me or is this your field? Because you’d need to know the percentage of the metal present in the coin to weigh it; gold and silver are too soft be pure. That introduces problems of debasement, a coin from an earlier minting might have a higher content than a later printing, and multiply that by all the different city-states, and you have a potential headache.