Bumping a (tagged) post to the top of archives

The query_posts function documentation does give an example on how to filter by time as well. Albeit, small and out of context.

The WP_Query documentation give much more information, including on Time Parameters that it accepts. query_posts is just a wrapper to methods provided by the global instance of the WP_Query class.

So, the correct argument set would be something of this sort:

$args = array(
    'tag' => 'the-tag',
    'year' => get_query_var( 'year' ),
    'month' => get_query_var( 'monthnum' )
);
query_posts( $args );

get_query_var will usually contain the year and the month for an archive.