On Aragorn's Tax Policy

 We are getting to the part of December where panic sets in: have to wrap presents, I should probably get a haircut, I have to finish up some reading, and some of the gifts still have to come in… And! I’m beginning to suspect that I need to go back and work on the NaNoWriMo manuscript.

However! There are some positives. I have started reading The Olympian Affair, and I have gotten Polite Society from the library to watch. That’s exciting.

On Aragorn’s Tax Policy

This hasn’t been making rounds or anything, but for whatever reason, it popped in my mind. Maybe I’ve just been thinking about Lord of the Rings a lot lately.

Famously (or infamously), George R.R. Martin, author of A Song of Ice and Fire, quipped in a 2014 interview with Rolling Stone, “What was Aragorn’s tax policy?” It’s more than a simple question about governance. It goes into Martin’s difference in his approach to kingship, ruling, morality, and how different of a viewpoint his stories have. Essentially, being a noble man and a fearsome warrior do not necessarily translate to being a good ruler, and accepting that the heroic fighter becomes a just king and everything’s hunky dory is silly.

Of course, the problem with this is that it’s a bad faith argument to begin with, built around a shallow familiarity with the text it’s interrogating.

Again, the point isn’t that Martin is asking about the taxes, it’s that he’s pointing out that a happy ending cannot be assumed because the good guys are the winners. It’s silly to assume that ARagorn is a good king because he’s a good man, true, but it’s also really dumb to assume that’s all he’s got going for him. Being raised in the household of a king, traveling the world and learning from other cultures, as well as fighting in their wars, yeah, he learned something about governance and warfare. Tolkien does not go into details about his reign, but tells us some key details: the wars he fought, and the peace he ultimately built. The further suggestion he makes that Aragorn ordered that all orc children be slaughtered is nonsensical, and seems to be applying the cruelty of his own fantasy world to another where it doesn’t fit.

There is this tendency that I’ve noticed to act as if The Lord of the Rings is a happy-go-lucky fantasy; a happy fairy tale world where everyone’s gracious and honorable, and it’s all threatened by a generic Dark Lord villain. Setting aside that Lord of the Rings is the setter for a lot of the trends you see in fantasy, so treating it as cliched is a silly thing to do, that’s not really what the story is at all. A lot of these misconceptions are built off of only watching the movies, which simplify things, but even then it’s a very shallow understanding of what’s going on in the film trilogy.

Middle-Earth, at the end of the Third Age, is not a world full of magic and wonder–it’s a world where the magic is fading away. The elves, who once ruled all over, are migrating away as their power fades. The last of the great dragons, Smaug, is dead. The great advanced kingdom of Men, Numenor, fell an Age ago, after being corrupted into a brutal imperialist state that sacrificed people and punished dissent, and then essentially it tried to invade Paradise.

What we’re seeing in the story of Middle-Earth is the last gasps of a magical world. This isn’t, “Everything is happy and wonderful!” This is, “The magic and wonder of the world is going away, which is a shame because it’d be darn helpful in fighting off the Dark Lord.”

And I don’t know if I’d say that there’s moral ambiguity in Tolkien, he’s not so dumb as to think that the line between good and evil is always clear. It’s quite obvious that he doesn’t think that at all–we see that with Frodo’s choices at the Crack of Doom, Bilbo’s entire story, Boromir’s falling to the Ring and his redemption before his death, Denethor’s despair, and Isildur’s corruption. These are not as simple as “This guy is good or evil!”

In short, it’s a statement about the text that deliberately ignores the details in the actual text to make a point. It’s like those people say, “It’s like a fairy tale, but DARKER!” I remember I complained about that on Facebook one time, and one of my friends replied with, “But fairy tales are dark.” Which is true, if you’ve read the Grimm stories, or any other older versions of fairy tales. Or the people who say they could kill Dracula by pushing him into the sunlight, when that doesn’t work in the original novel.

It’s dumb! I get what Martin’s going for, that he’s curious about fantasy worlds’ takes on politics, and wants to do something different with it. But you can do that without obviously showing that you don’t know much about the books you’re discussing! And it’s frustrating because Martin is influential enough that I see people talk about how he just understands people and politics better than Tolkien, when he can’t even be bothered to do full research on the fictional ruler he’s talking about.

[Also the kind of government Tolkien gives to Gondor means taxes is a pretty odd thing to ask about, as if it’s a modern democratic administration.]

Anyway.

—