Alright I am going to come in here with my knowledge of medieval food prices, wages and just food in general. First off, I question the statement Eriol made about why the retainment of knowledge from previous civilisations would have anything to do with supplies. I don't really see what that has to do with anything as the vast majority of people would only consume food and drink produced in their near vicinity even before the so-called 'fall' of Rome. I would even argue that from 1000 AD onwards the medieval world was better connected tradewise and had better technology than the ancient Greeks and Romans. So it heavily depends on what part of the medieval era you are referring to and even then it is kind of a weird statement to make. But that is besides the point and I will try to answer the questions to the best of my ability.
1. First things first: prices would have probably differed from city to city, depending on what is easily available in said city. A city on the coast is going to have cheaper fish of course than a city in land. Add to that that even in ancient times prices, wages and even the value of coins could and did change in relatively short periods of time. The general population got richer, people got poorer, harvest were more or less bountiful, trade routes got disrupted etc.. All this heavily influenced prices and wages. Crop failure influenced the grain supply, which influenced grain prices, which influenced the purchasing power of households. An economic crisis could cause the local ruler to devalue the coins minted under their authority (which would mean using less precious metal to produce the same sort of coins), which again influenced the purchasing power of anyone using that money. So trying to establish a fixed prices and wages is not a worthwile endeavour.
-ADDENDUM: though I just have spent a whole paragraph highlighting that prices, wages and all things fiscal were heavily subject to change, there were ways that mainly prices were fixed through legislation by the proper institutes. Those institutes would be the local guilds - who had a local monopoly on their particular craft - but just as well could be the local city council or ruler; sometimes even the king (or equivalent there of) would fix prices to secure a sufficient supply of food.
2. To figure out what an average Gondorian household would spend on food, we have to figure out roughly what they would eat ... which is a bit more difficult to figure out than you would first expect. To assume that the agriculture of Middle-Earth would be like that of Medieval Europe, would be wrong. The texts -both The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings - clearly mention New World crops like tobacco (
The Fellowship of the Ring, 'Prologue', p. 7-9) and of course Sam's famous 'taters' (
The Two Towers, 'Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit', p. 640). In the first edition of the Hobbit Bilbo even served up tomatoes to his Dwarven guests. Corn also gets mentioned quite a bit within the books, but I believe that it is used in the old way as a synonym of cereal crops and not necessarily for maize, so it doesn't really count. However it still seems that the main staples of the Middle Earth diet still seem to indeed be the Old World 'basics': bread, cheese, milk, beer, honey, salted and/or smoked meat (
'What's taters Precious': Food in Tolkien's 'The Lord of the Rings', p. 342). When we contrast this with the diet of Medieval Tuscany (in my opinion an good approximation of Gondor), we see some similarities. Cereals indeed form a large part of an average medieval villager, so bread (mostly baked by the peasants themselves; urban inahabitants are more likely to go to a bakery) is probably common as are other foods based on grains, like porridge. Pork is an important meat in heavily wooded areas, while goat meat and mutton replace it when forests get cleared. Beef would be far less common, seen as 1) cattle was expensive and 2) keep your cattle alive provides both a production of milk and a strong laboursource; peasants would thus keep their cattle alive much longer and slaughter them only at the end of their lifespan. So cheese and dairy products in general would also be quite present in local markets. However the (mentioned) diet of Middle Earth also lacks some pillars of medieval food consumption: legumes and pulses, like beans, peas and lentils, were important parts of a medieval meal in Tuscany, as were vegetables like cabbages, but they get no mention in Tolkien's world. (
Multiproxy approach to the study of Medieval food habits in Tuscany (central Italy), p. 662-666) What mostly was consumed in Medieval Tuscany and Middle Earth/Gondor where thus products that could relatively easily be stored for longer times or transformed into products that could be. These were also supplemented by local available herbs for peasants and more exotic spices for 'richer' urban dwellers, together with what could be scavenged and caught like nuts, berries, fruits. The meat supply would be also increased by catching local game (as far as that was allowed) and fishes from nearby bodies of water (Salmon for example, was considered peasant food in the more Northern regions of Europe). Though all of this isn't necessarily mentioned in the Lord of the Rings, it isn't unreasonable to assume that the diet of a Gondorian peasant would not be too dissimilar to that of a medieval Tuscan villager, though ofcourse with New World crops like potatoes apparently added to it. A Gondorian peasant would thus probably have a bit more of a varied diet than their real world counterparts.
3. Now as to food prices ... though I understand the inclination to just go ah well this thing costs this amount of castars and that other this amount of tharni, but that doesn't really tell us anything. Well it tells us hows much it costs, but not how affordable that would be for the general populace. The problem with the prices that Eriol gave is that they are completely arbitrary (which he admitted) and thus don't really give an indication as to how much it would actually cost a household to buy the listed products. This is mainly the fault of Tolkien, as he - as far as I am aware - never really clarified how the currency in his world functioned, so we are forced to make such arbitrary assumptions. Now what we do have a prices and wages for a lot of areas of late Medieval Europe, so we can make some assumptions as to how much a labourer could make. I will base this mainly off of wages and prices from Florence, seen as it is situated in Tuscany as well and is a city somewhat comparable to Dol Amroth probably in size and wealth. So in Florence, the average amount of silver spent on food in 1420-1439 that is needed to reach the food poverty line (so the minimum amount that needs to be spent/consumed to not be considered poor) per year is about 166,7 grams of silver. Now the average wage of a labourer in that same city would be about 5 to 7 grams of silver a day. (
Italy in the Renaissance: a leading economy in the European context, 1350-1550, p. 11, 15-16) This means that to afford the minimum amount of money needed for the minimum amount of food necessary to sustain an average household for a year, a labourer had to work about 34 days in said year. Keep in mind that medieval people didn't work the whole year round, as they had about as much holidays as a modern European country, plus a labourer was not always employed: he had to search and find employement of course. Very few people were permanently employed and thus had a consistent wage. So though 34 days at first may seem not that much, it is quite a significant chunk of the yearly wage and there are still some points to be considered. 1) These wages come from a relatively affluent era of Florentine history, so during periods of economic decline the wages would also have been lower and people would have had to work more for the same amount, while probably the prices also went up; 2) this is for the minimal amount of food consumption and most people consume more than that, and thus spend more than that on food; and 3) other expenditures were still necessary like cloth (though the percentage spent on clothes would probably not be a large amount, seen as most people made and repaired their own clothes, as well as kept their clothes for far longer, often handing them down for generations), rent and taxes. But we can say that to forsee in the minimum amount of food necessary to sustain an average household for a year in a quite wealthy city like Dol Amroth , a normal labourer would have to work a about just more than a month.
I hope this answer suffices.
Sources:
- Buonincontri, Mauro Paolo et. al.. 'Multiproxy approach to the study of Medieval food habits in Tuscany (central Italy)'. Archaeological and anthropological sciences 9, nr. 4 (2017): p. 653-671. Multiproxy approach to the study of Medieval food habits in Tuscany (central Italy) - Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences
- Freedman, Paul and Mark Anderson. 'What's taters Precious': Food in Tolkien's 'The Lord of the Rings''. Imago Temporis. Medium Aevum 6 (2012): p 339-350. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/39131202.pdf
- Malanima, Paolo. 'Italy in the Renaissance: a leadingeconomy in the European context,1350–1550'. Economic History Review 71, nr. 1 (2018): p. 3-30. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/ehr.12650
- Tolkien, J. R. R.. The Fellowship of the Ring. 2014: Boston/New York, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
- Tolkien, J. R. R.. The Two Towers. 2014: Boston/New York, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
