Middle-Earth | Can’t Sleep? Learn About Tolkien’s Legendary World

J.R.R. Tolkien first encountered the term "Middle-earth" in an Old English fragment he studied in 1913–1914—a line from the poem Christ by Cynewulf that mentions "Earendel." That name became the inspiration for Tolkien's mariner Eärendil, who sails from Middle-earth to ask the angelic Valar for aid. Tolkien's earliest poem about Eärendil, written the same year he read the Christ poem, refers to "the Midworld's rim." This single linguistic spark grew into a complete imagined prehistory of our own world.

Tolkien understood "Middle-earth" not as a different planet, but as "my mother earth for place, but in an imaginary past time." The term descends from the Old English Middangeard and the Old Norse Miðgarðr—the world of men, situated between heaven above and hell below. In careful geographical terms, Middle-earth is a continent on the physical world of Arda, which itself is part of the wider creation called Eä. The western continent of Aman, home to the Valar and the Elves called the Eldar, is separated from Middle-earth by the Great Sea Belegaer, though they meet in the far north at the Grinding Ice. Most of Tolkien's stories take place in the northwest of Middle-earth; in the First Age, the subcontinent Beleriand lay further northwest, but it was engulfed by the ocean at the end of that age.