After I did this post, @joannalannister asked if I could do a similar set of estimates for the other Great Houses, so I figured I might as well knock them out.
@racefortheironthrone, so what would you say is the actual figure for annual Lannister income?
Lannister revenues are approximately 4 million dragons per year
say the Casterly Rock mine yields (roughly) 2 million dragons per year (I use this figure because 2 million ounces is the annual yield of the best modern day gold mine, the Grasberg mine, using modern mining techniques; the Lannisters use medieval mining techniques but Casterly Rock is supposed to be the best in Terros, and Terros is the real world turned up to Eleven, so I figure it’s a wash.)
Castamere – for argument’s sake, say Castamere yields 1.75 million dragons per year, which goes directly into the Lannister coffers
the Golden Tooth, Nunn’s Deep, and the Pendric Hills – say each of these yields 1 million dragons, for a total of 3 million – but how much do the Lannisters get from this yield? How much goes to the families whose seats these are?
Can you talk more about this? Would you argue that these (very rough) guesses of gold mine yields are too low? How much gold would vassal houses have to surrender to their overlord house? Or does House Lannister own all the gold mines and the vassal houses just get a small portion of the yield? How much annual income do the Lannisters have???
Sure I can talk about this.
About those proposed yields:
Casterly Rock sounds about right, being worth a kingdom in its own right would explain why Essos thinks of it in the same way that people in the 19th century thought of the California gold rush.
I don’t think Castamere itself is a working gold mine, though – the lands around it still produce tax revenue (possibly from lesser mines?), but the mine proper was flooded by Tywin, so I don’t think it produces anywhere near that much.
I don’t think the Golden Tooth is supposed to be a mine. That info appeared only in the AGOT appendix and dropped out of further appendices when it started showing up more prominently as a castle in a mountain pass.
As for Nunn’s Deep and the Pendric Hills – they’ve got to be substantial enough to be worth sacking, but not so substantial that the houses that own them are important enough for us to have heard of them. So maybe a million between them?
Now, in terms of who owns what. This is tricky. Real-world historical examples would say that the Lannisters own all of it and then lease mining rights to people for a percentage. However, WOIAF suggests otherwise – the Reynes owned Castamere’s mines outright, etc. So I would guess instead that the Lannisters just exact feudal taxes as per norm, but with the Westerlands being unusual in that most taxes are paid in gold rather than in kind.
In terms of House Lannister of Casterly Rock’s income…four million in taxes is taking the very high end of estimates, assuming that the Westerlands is a third above the hind end of estimates for smallfolk income. I would guess that total incomes is probably closer to 5 million than 6.
Why can’t Golden Tooth be both a mine and a castle? Didn’t the Worldbook say that Westerlands castles started out as mines and that most of the castles are actually underground?
Well for one thing, it’s a castle in a mountain pass, i.e the space between two mountains. There’s no there there to mine. You could do panning, I suppose, but the Red Fork and the Tumblestone where you might see gold flake coming down from the mountains are far away from the Golden Tooth itself.
And no, the WOIAF said that Casterly Rock and Castamere were built out of mines, not all Westerlands castles. In fact, Castamere was distinctive because it was underground, otherwise it woud be commonplace.
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