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Aragorn’s Tax Policy and Other Weird Shibboleths
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Aragorn’s Tax Policy and Other Weird Shibboleths
Finally, a helpful explanation of why medieval rulers and modern tax policies don’t mix…
By Liz Bourke
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Published on March 30, 2026
Credit: New Line Cinema
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Credit: New Line Cinema
In a 2014 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.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. A brief survey brings back the facts that Aragorn (“Elessar,” the name under which he reigns):
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, and the same with regard to the Forest of Druadán and the people of Ghân-buri-Ghân,
reclaims the territory of Umbar from the Corsairs,
releases the slaves of Mordor (Sauron’s human labour force and his agricultural workers) and gives them land around Lake Núrnen to settle on,
makes it so orcs no longer threaten the people of Gondor,
goes to war in the South with the Rohirrim as allies
beautifies the city of Minas Tirith
ultimately makes peace with the men of the South and the East
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.1 There are arguments to the effect that Gondor’s closest real-life comparator is the 10th or 11th century Byzantine Empire (or the Eastern Roman Empire, as it knew itself), but it is not possible to see in the text an equivalent to the thematic administrative system or the metropolitan officialdom, while it also lacks Byzantium’s extensive religious communities and large urban centres, with the possible exception of Minas Tirith.
In the modern world we speak of taxes as regressive (the effective tax rate decreases as the amount subject to taxation increases2) or progressive3 (in which the tax rate increases as the taxable amount increases), and modern taxation is used for two main purposes besides raising revenue: to incentivise or disincentivise behaviour by adding or reducing the cost of carrying out that behaviour4; and to redistribute resources from the most well-off to the most in need, and thus flatten income inequality.5 This is a simplified view of taxation, of course. But while a modern state usually has the state capacity with regard to literacy and bureaucracy to both collect taxes in a targeted and granular fashion, and to refine them based on knowledge of their effects, a medieval kingdom doesn’t have this capacity. A medieval kingdom is limited in its ability to know things about its territory and that territory’s inhabitants, and to exert effective control over that territory and those inhabitants, both of which are necessary to raise revenue through taxation. These limits also constrain its ability to develop the deep bench of a competent, literate, and loyal bureaucracy that would enable it to extend its reach in terms of knowledge and control.6
Structurally, then, a medieval 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: road tolls, river tolls, bridge 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.
We do not know much about Gondor’s trade, but there may also be customs duties. In consequence of customs duties, there would be a smuggling industry that required suppression for the customs duties to raise much revenue at all.
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’s 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 Men of Gondor killing baby orcs, if orcs breed like men: one cannot imagine Elessar is able to settle repentant orcs peaceably next to their very long-term human enemies on his lands without having to suppress a great deal of local unrest.7
A certain amount of border warfare with the Men of the South/East over generational grudges is very likely until Elessar is able to achieve a settled peace. Any peace dividend is therefore likely to be both quite small for some time and concentrated in the parts of Gondor closest to Rohan, which will have suffered least over years of war and been least ravaged by the latest violent crisis.
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 speaks to a shallow, or perhaps a careless, 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. This household guard is usually very small relative to the total of possible men under arms in the entire kingdom. No, the money they require is 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. Sometimes it is to afford to pay what pre-modern texts often refer to as “mercenaries” but for which a better understanding is “professional soldier who works for pay” rather than the more usual “adult male who is obliged to serve a certain number of days on military service as a condition of his (or his household’s) residence within the territory.”
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 Aragorn would likely find it very difficult, if not impossible, to maintain a standing army outside his royal household men-at-arms. Maintainingtoo many men under arms means taking resources from other necessary expenditures, while also making a king’s lords worry about what he means to use those men-at-arms for. (Quite possibly Minas Tirith has an extensive militia, though, 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 of professional soldiers, 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 leaving, especially if there’s extensive amounts of land not under cultivation and far from lordly surveillance. (Sometimes it erupts in convulsive violence, such as that reported by unsympathetic Jean le Bel and Jean Froissart of the French Jacquerie of 1358.)
This is an 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”: he’s constrained by (lack of) state capacity.8 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 so through initiatives 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.
Note: 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 has wide relevance to thinking about state capacity in both pre-modern and modern times. The work of Walter Scheidel (as an editor, author, and co-author) has also been both illuminating and accessible when it comes to thinking about the nature of state power and the economy in pre-modern polities.
This article was originally published at Liz Bourke’s Patreon.
Urban centres and large monastic centres are often treated as corporate bodies very similar to lords, in this system. I do not want to fail to mention them: though their internal administration is different to that of the land-holding military aristocrat, as bodies they have control of similar resources and so a king must reckon with their interests and influence as well. ︎https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regressive_tax ︎https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_tax ︎For example, higher rates of sales tax or VAT on alcohol and tobacco are supposed to discourage its consumption, while the rate of customs or import taxes on various classes of goods are an effective government tool. ︎Examples of this function include: progressive income tax, inheritance taxes, taxes on gifts. ︎Indeed, we see in pre-modern polities who do manage to develop an extensive literate administrative class/court-centred bureaucracy that they must weather the trade-off in an increase in what we might as well call palace intrigue: from the Papal States to merchant republics like Venice and Byzantium, and the Ottoman Empire to pre-modern China. ︎Merely human enmities in the real world have an extensive history of such violence, and the aftermath of war and the redrawing of borders in the 20th century and after has often seen genocidal violence enacted even where a central government wanted to prevent the murder of potential tax-payers. ︎In order to raise additional revenues he needs more revenue than he’s required to spend on immediate circumstances, to invest in building the tools that he can use to raise that revenue. This is partly why we hear about medieval kings having revenue problems so often: crises that require them to spend more resources reduce their ability to extract those resources. ︎The post Aragorn’s Tax Policy and Other Weird Shibboleths appeared first on Reactor.
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