Currency Conversion

[Camille]

Hey everyone! I'm new to the group.
I was wondering if anyone had any idea about currency conversion. Not within the world, but from Cealdish currency to US currency. I know there's no way to get an exact conversion, but has anyone put any thought into it?

[Gaard]

at one point pat put a conversion worksheet website link on his blog at www.patrickrothfuss.com, you could check there.

[Camille]

Thanks, but that conversion worksheetis between currencies in the book. Thanks though!

[Gaard]

well you could probably say that a half penny is close to the equivilent of a half penny of medieval times...then go from there to current rates

[Camille]

I did some work yesterday trying to figure out a conversion between Cealdish currency and US currency. My method for this was finding the actual 14th century England prices for a few things that we know the prices for in KKC.

I started with shoes. When Kvothe buys shoes in Tarbean, the cobbler tells him that the new shoes would cost him around 1 Talent. According to this site, a pair of shoes cost about 6d (pence). I found here that 1d is equal to about £20 today. So based on this, 1 Talent= £120, or $200.

I wanted to back this up with another conversion, so I looked at university cost. I found here that tuition at a university for a year would cost about 2L (20 shillings, about £2000), so university would cost about £4000/yr. Because tuition at the University is paid on a term-to-term basis, and there are 4 terms in a year, tuition would be about £1000/term. Because of the way tuition at the University works, there’s no set tuition, but I figured 5 Talents/term for E’lir seemed about average. So 1 Talent= £200, around $340. Not exactly the same as my first figure, but close enough to confirm that it’s about right as far as I’m concerned. I’m going to average at about $300/Talent.

This was just me messing around and seeing what I could find, so it’s in no way the last word on the subject! If anyone has any information, any other prices we could cross-reference to back this up or compare, or any comments on my process, please share!

[Amber, Master Sympathist]

You might want to look at the coin sets they have been coming out with. I don't think they've done an exact for the time period Kvothe is in, but it seems to be part of a larger plan eventually.

http://thetinkerspacks.bigcartel.com/