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I always wondered why Tolkien made up the term Middle Earth. I mean I can see creatures living underground, but there is no realm of the sky. Then today I was writing a question with the word Mediterranean in it. Curse you and your bloody puzzles JRR!
“I may not be fast, but I am slow.”
As a linguist, Tolkien took “Middle-earth” from earlier writings and it is synonomous with Midgard, Middenheim, etc. in Germanic (Nordic) mythology. Although Tolien was not always consistent with his use of “Middle-earth”, He generally used the term to refer to the main continent of Arda. In Tolien’s mythology, Arda (“Earth”) was created flat. So the land was the middle of Arda between the sky and the deep sea. It was also the main continent between the land of the gods (Powers) in the West (Valinor) and the eastern edge of the world where the elves originally awoken. Only at the end of the Second Age with the destruction of Numenor was Arda made round (and Valinor removed from the confines of the physical world). After that, “Middle-earth” primarily is used to describe the main continent of the world in which lay Arnor, Gondor, Mirkwood, and Mordor.
Sorry, Tolkien geek here. 🙂 For anyone who has read only The Hobbit and the LOtR trilogy, I highly recommend reading The Silmarilion and the Book of Lost Tales (Vol. 1 and 2). The additional back story is incredible and you can really see how Tolkien spent his life (from the early 1910’s until his death in 1972) working and re-working the mythology and tales of Middle-earth.
I also remember hearing he and a group of friends created languages both for the series and in “real” life for fun.
wow, this thread smells like geek.
I like it.Seconded.
I also remember hearing he and a group of friends created languages both for the series and in “real” life for fun.
Probably these guys. Narnia and Middle Earth, among other things like secret languages, may have sprung from these meetings… iron sharpens iron, as they say. Not unlike our LUG.
The literary club with C.S. Lewis, etc. was formed after Tolkien’s school years. While he was at King Edward’s School in Birmingham and then at Oxford, he and three of his closest friends formed the Tea Club of the Barovian Society (TCBS), based upon their mutual love of languages and heroic tales (like Beowulf). I have always found it fascinating that Tolkien created the elvish languages first, and then created the Middle-earth mythology around his invented languages to explain who was speking the languages and why. The story came second, the languages first.
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