137. Aragorn’s tax policy and other weird shibboleths
Yesterday I found myself diverted by people on Bluesky revisiting the issue of Aragorn’s tax policy that George R.R. Martin so memorably quibbled over back in 2014.
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In 2014, in an interview with Rolling Stone, George R.R. Martin had the following exchange with his interviewer:
> **A major concern in _A Song of Ice and Fire_ and _Game of Thrones_ is power. Almost everybody – except maybe Daenerys, across the waters with her dragons – wields power badly.**
>
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> _Ruling is hard. This was maybe my answer to Tolkien, whom, as much as I admire him, I do quibble with. Lord of the Rings had a very medieval philosophy: that if the king was a good man, the land would prosper. We look at real history and it’s not that simple. Tolkien can say that Aragorn became king and reigned for a hundred years, and he was wise and good. But Tolkien doesn’t ask the question: What was Aragorn’s tax policy? Did he maintain a standing army? What did he do in times of flood and famine? And what about all these orcs? By the end of the war, Sauron is gone but all of the orcs aren’t gone – they’re in the mountains. Did Aragorn pursue a policy of systematic genocide and kill them? Even the little baby orcs, in their little orc cradles?_
“Aragorn’s tax policy” is, to some extent, an articulation of something that has haunted the discussion of “realistic” fantasy ever since. But on the face of it, it’s a facile question to ask, because medieval kings are structurally constrained: they can’t have a “tax policy” in a modern sense.
It has been years since I read the Lord of the Rings, and I never paid much attention to the appendices anyway. But as I recall, Aragorn (“Elessar,” his reign name) rules over the conjoined kingdoms of Gondor in the south and Arnor in the north, gives a charter to the Shire confirming its rights of self-government, makes it so orcs no longer threaten the people of Gondor, frees people from bondage, defeats the corsairs, and makes peace with the Haradrim, or Southron kingdoms. That’s the précis.
Gondor, structurally, looks like a medieval polity. 11th-century England, or 10th/11th-century France, is probably the most useful comparison: the king is a powerful lord who balances factions among less (but not always much less) powerful lords. Structurally, such a kingdom doesn’t have the state capacity to have a very granular tax policy. Very likely King Elessar would have to employ decentralised tax collection — that is to say, tax farming. The royal income would be supplemented by income from royal holdings (lands either rented to farmers, from which the income is rent, or worked on the king’s behalf by paid laborers, from which the income is everything left over after expenditures), and from tolls. Probably this income is supplemented by some royal monopolies and by a portion of fines levied in law courts for breaches of law. (We do not have a clear idea of how the laws of Numenór or of Gondor work, but fines are a consistent punishment across medieval Europe.) Very likely a proportion of the royal “income” comes in the form of labour duties — corvée labour — on top of payments in cash or kind.
Most of Middle Earth is not densely populated, as far as we can tell. Gondor appears to have a good deal of worked agricultural land. It has been pressed by Mordor for centuries, so there is likely to be some peace dividend, once the rebuilding is complete. Considering that many Men of Gondor have been killed, however, some land probably falls out of cultivation for a generation. Given the absence of a paramount warlord in Mordor, orcs probably resort to raiding for survival and subsistence, so we may also expect a certain amount of low-intensity warfare until Elessar is able to drive all the orcs out of his kingdom (this is probably an effort that takes decades, and yes, it probably does involve the Men of Gondor killing baby orcs, if orcs breed like men: one cannot imagine Elessar is able to settle repentant orcs peaceably on his lands) and a certain amount of border warfare with the Men of the South over generational grudges until Elessar is able to achieve a settled peace. Any peace dividend is likely to be both quite small for some time and concentrated in the parts of Gondor closest to Rohan.
Aragorn’s tax policy then, must resemble that of any successfully consolidating early medieval king. It’s very straightforward: the tax policies of Gondor — and Rohan, too — are implicit in the text by virtue of their structure _as_ polities. And Tolkien, as a man very familiar with the early medieval world — as it is clear from the texts that he is very familiar with the logistics of early medieval war — no doubt understood it to _be_ implicit. To ask the question of “Aragorn’s tax policy” or his maintenance of a standing army betrays a shallow understanding of the _limits_ and _constraints_ of state power in early and high medieval polities.
Kings require income. They require it primarily for warfare, and secondarily to demonstrate their legitimacy. The money they require for warfare is not usually to pay men-at-arms directly (with the exception of what we may consider a household guard of men permanently under arms directly in their service, which is usually very small relative to the total of _possible_ men under arms in the entire kingdom) but to afford the logistical burden of feeding, housing, and transporting those men-at-arms _and their food_ while they are on campaign, and building or repairing fortifications. Meanwhile, legitimacy is demonstrated through largesse, building projects, personal accoutrements, religious donations, the repair and upkeep of public works, and sustaining relationships with their lords — often through gifts. (So no, Aragorn would likely find it impossible to maintain a standing army outside his royal household men-at-arms. Quite possibly Minas Tirith has an extensive militia, however, and is used to having part of it raised to garrison and defend the city at any given time. Minas Tirith may even have a permanent standing garrison, but that’s both expensive and in close quarters with a royal court, dangerous.)
The capacity to raise the income a king requires is constrained primarily by two things:
a) how much knowledge the king and his court has and _is able to have_ about the productive capacities of their land and the economic value of trade in and out of the kingdom;
b) how much control, and how _fine-grained_ a control, they can exert in extracting surplus income above subsistence from the peasantry.
Knowledge is generally the most difficult part, even for modern states with extensive bureaucracies. But control of extraction is also difficult, because peasants — the agricultural class comprising 90% of the population — will resist both actively and passively having too much of their surplus extracted. This resistance most often involves hiding or concealing some part of their production, but it can extend to just _leaving_ , especially if there’s extensive amounts of land not under cultivation and far from lordly surveillance.
This is the simple outline of an explanation as to why Aragorn can’t really have something that we’d understand in the modern sense as a “tax policy,” either progressive or regressive: he is constrained by (lack of) state capacity. Perhaps he directs himself towards building state capacity: centralising administration, building the ability of his court — his kingdom’s administrative centre — to do things and to find out shit about his kingdom. But that’s a different question. Tolkien’s vision of a good king follows medieval Christian lines: he rules with respect for existing law and custom; he restrains unjust lords; he gives good justice and does not resort to arbitrary caprice; he makes war when necessary to defend his subjects and delivers peace that lets them prosper without fear of unlawful violence. Now, this is the _ideal_ king, the king of propaganda and self-presentation: most medieval kings in historical perspective are rather less capable or less inclined to do these things even to the extent that they are possible for medieval kings _to do._ (They must respond to flood and famine, and usually do by things like remitting taxes and attempting to buy grain from abroad.) But a king in Elessar’s position, victorious in war, humble by disposition, with decades of experience in the world behind him, aware that the legitimacy of kingship itself is in question because the Stewards managed quite well for centuries until Denethor was faced with the whole might of Sauron, and with no major enemies that might offer him competition or a long war? He might, in fact, manage to be a very competent king indeed — even a very good one, by the medieval rubric.
I draw my emphasis on knowledge and control from the work of James C. Scott, in particular _Seeing Like a State_ and _The Art of Not Being Governed_ , which I find to have wide relevance to thinking about state capacity in both pre-modern and modern times. A broad understanding of how pre-modern polities taxed and spent is best gained through wide reading, but I’ve found the work of Walter Scheidel (as an editor, author, and co-author) to be both illuminating and accessible when it comes to thinking about the nature of state power and the economy in pre-modern polities.
This post was lightly revised and expanded from a thread on Bluesky.
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