Middle-earth is a fictional place which is the setting for most of the stories of author J. R. R. Tolkien. These stories include The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings . Tolkien's stories chronicle the struggle to control the world (called Arda) and the continent of Middle-earth, between the angelic Valar, the Elves and their allies among Men; and the demonic Melkor or Morgoth (a Vala fallen into evil) and his minions, mostly Orcs, Dragons and enslaved men. In later ages, after Morgoth's defeat and expulsion from Arda, his role is continued by his acolyte Sauron. The Valar withdrew from direct involvement in the affairs of Middle-earth after the defeat of Morgoth, but in later years they sent the wizards or Istari to help in the struggle against Sauron. The most important of these were Gandalf the Grey and Saruman the White. Gandalf remained true to his mission and proved crucial in the fight for Sauron's destruction. Saruman however, became corrupted, and sought to establish himself as a rival to Sauron for absolute power in Middle-earth. Other races involved in the struggle against evil are Dwarves, Ents and most famously Hobbits. The early stages of the conflict are chronicled in Tolkien's work The Silmarillion , while the final stages of the struggle to defeat Sauron are dealt with in his works The Hobbit and the main text of The Lord of the Rings .
A recurring theme in the stories is that the focus of conflict is on the possession and control of precious or magical objects. The First Age of Middle-earth is dominated by the doomed quest of the Elf Fëanor and most of his Noldor clan to recover the three precious jewels called the Silmarils (hence the name Silmarillion ), stolen from them by Morgoth. The Second and Third Age are both dominated by the forging of the Rings of Power, and in particular by the fate of the One Ring forged by Sauron, which grants its wearer the power to control or influence all those wearing the other Rings of Power (hence the name The Lord of the Rings ).
Tolkien prepared several maps of Middle-earth and the regions of Middle-earth in which his stories took place. Some were published in his lifetime, though some of the earliest maps were not published until after his death. The main maps were those published in The Hobbit , The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion . Most of the events of the First Age took place in the subcontinent Beleriand (left), which was later subsumed by the ocean at the end of the First Age; the Blue Mountains at the right edge of the map of Beleriand, are the same Blue Mountains that appear on the extreme left of the map of Middle-earth described in the Second and Third Ages (right). Tolkien's map of Middle-earth however only shows a small part of the world; most of the vast lands of Rhûn and Harad are not shown on the map, and there are also other continents altogether.
Tolkien said that his Middle-earth is located on our Earth, but in a fictional period in the past, estimating the end of the Third Age to about 6,000 years before his own time. He was later to reject this notion, and state that Middle-earth was not at a physically distant time, but rather "at a different stage of imagination".
Historical conceptions
In ancient Germanic mythology, the world of Men is known by several names, such as Midgard, Middenheim, Manaheim, and Middengeard, and is located in the centre of the universe; while Bifröst, the rainbow bridge, extended from Middle-earth to Asgard, the land of the gods. Beneath Middle-earth lay Hel, the land of the Dead. The universe as a whole was believed to consist of nine physical "worlds" joined together. The precise arrangement of these worlds is uncertain. According to one view, seven worlds lay across an encircling sea: The lands of Elves (Alfheim), Dwarves (Niðavellir), Gods (Asgard and Vanaheim), and Giants (Jotunheim and Muspelheim). Other Norse scholars place these seven worlds in the sky, in the branches of Yggdrasil the "World Ash Tree" (possibly the inspiration for the Two Trees of Valinor).
Etymology
The term "Middle-earth," also commonly referred to as "middle-world," was therefore not invented by Tolkien. It occurs in Early Modern English as a development of the Middle English word middel-erde (cf. modern German Mittelerde ), which developed in turn from Old English middanġeard (the g being soft, i.e. pronounced like y in "yard"). By the time of the Middle English period, middangeard was being written as middellærd , midden-erde , or middel-erde . A slight difference of wording, but not general meaning, had taken place as middangeard properly means "middle enclosure" instead of "middle-earth". Nevertheless middangeard has been commonly translated as "middle-earth" and Tolkien followed this course.
Middangeard descends from an earlier Germanic word and so has cognates in languages related to Old English such as the Old Norse word Miðgarðr from Norse mythology, transliterated to modern English as Midgard .
Use by Tolkien
Tolkien first encountered the term middangeard in an Old English fragment he studied in 1914:
Éala éarendel engla beorhtast / ofer middangeard monnum sended.
Hail Earendel, brightest of angels / above the middle-earth sent unto men.
This quote is from the second of the fragmentary remnants of the Crist poems by Cynewulf. The name Éarendel was the inspiration for Tolkien's mariner Eärendil. who set sail from the lands of Middle-earth to ask for aid from the angelic powers, the Valar. Tolkien's earliest poem about Eärendil, from 1914, the same year he read the Crist poems, refers to "the mid-world's rim".
The concept of middangeard was considered by Tolkien to be the same as a particular usage of the Greek word οἰκουμένη - oikoumenē (from which the word ecumenical is derived). In this usage Tolkien says that the oikoumenē is "the abiding place of men"; by this he means it is the physical world in which man lives out his life and destiny, as opposed to the unseen worlds, like Heaven or Hell.
"Middle-earth is ... not my own invention. It is a modernization or alteration ... of an old word for the inhabited world of Men, the oikoumene : middle because thought of vaguely as set amidst the encircling Seas and (in the northern-imagination) between ice of the North and the fire of the South. O. English middan-geard , mediaeval E. midden-erd , middle-erd . Many reviewers seem to assume that Middle-earth is another planet!"— J.R.R. Tolkien, Letters, no. 211The term Middle-earth is not, however, used in Tolkien's earliest writings about his created world: writings that date from the early 1920s and which were later published in The Book of Lost Tales (1983-4); nor is the term used in The Hobbit (1937). Tolkien began to use the term "Middle-earth" in the latter part of the 1930s, in place of the earlier terms "Great Lands", "Outer Lands", and "Hither Lands" that he had used to describe this region in his stories. The term Middle-earth appears in the drafts of The Lord of the Rings , and the first published appearance of the word "Middle-earth" in Tolkien's works is in the Prologue to that work: "...Hobbits had, in fact, lived quietly in Middle-earth for many long years before other folk even became aware of them."
The term also occurs in the Old English poem The Wanderer : "... as now in various places / throughout this middle-earth ..."; Tolkien was fond of the poem and from it lifted large sections of verse for use in various songs and poems occurring throughout his work.
Usage and misunderstandings
The term Middle-earth can be also applied as a nickname of the entirety of Tolkien's creation, instead of the more appropriate, but less known terms Arda which refers to Tolkien's world (including celestial bodies), and Eä, which refers to the universe. This is seen also in the title of books such as The Complete Guide to Middle-earth , The Road to Middle-earth , The Atlas of Middle-earth , and in particular the series The History of Middle-earth , all of which cover areas outside of the strict geographical definition of the term Middle-earth. Tolkien himself used the term loosely at times.
A possible explanation is that the word Arda is never mentioned in The Lord of the Rings , and it was not until the 1977 publication of The Silmarillion that readers learned of the word.
The term "Middle-earth" is sometimes mis-capitalised as "Middle-Earth" and the hyphen is sometimes incorrectly omitted as well, as in "Middle Earth", "Middle earth" and "Middleearth".
Geography
Within the overall context of his legendarium, Tolkien's Middle-earth was part of his created world of Arda (which includes the Undying Lands of Aman and Eressea, removed from the rest of the physical world), which itself was part of the wider creation he called Eä.
Middle-earth cosmology
Main article: Middle-earth cosmologyThe easiest way to understand Middle-earth's place in Tolkien's complex system is to see his whole creation as a series of worlds within worlds. As the outer layer is the whole universe itself, c
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