In celebration of Harry’s first visit to Diagon Alley on July 31, we’re very excited to present the Wizarding World Currency Exchange to help all you Muggles in your magical shopping. Hagrid may think that seventeen Sickles to the Galleon is “easy enough,” but we Muggles find it complicated. But fear not, the Converter is here to take the headache out of shopping. Just enter the amount, either in Muggle money or in Wizarding world coins, and the Converter will magically give you the correct equivalent amount.
The exchange rates are current to the hour. You can set a historical date as well, so you can work out how much Harry’s 7 Galleon wand was worth in yen or dollars or rubles back on the 31st of July in 1991 (historical rates are correct as of the end of that day).
Fans will immediately ask where we get our exchange rate for Galleons, since there are several theories in fandom about that value. Because we’re the Lexicon and have tied ourselves tightly to canon, we are going with the only specific canon reference to the value for a Galleon which is Rowling’s statement in an interview that a Galleon is worth “about five pounds” (CR). For lack of any additional information, we work with the assumption that the Galleon is tied to the pound and stays at that value. This rate agrees with the numbers found in Rowling’s Foreword to the school books:
Comic Relief U. K. uses laughter to fight poverty, injustice, and disaster. Widespread amusement is converted into large quantities of money (over 250 million dollars since they started in 1985 – which is the equivalent of over 174 million pounds or thirty-four million Galleons). (QA)
We have a number of other interesting features and enhancements planned for the Wizarding World Currency Exchange. We’ll let you know when they become live. For example, if you check this page, you’ll see that the right hand fact box now shows the exchange rate for that particular day. That feature is still in beta, so to speak, so it will be rolling out to all events over the next few days.
