The Origins of Tolkien's Middle-Earth for Dummies (Paperback)

Chapter One

In This Chapter

* The location and origin of Middle-earth

* Tolkien's idea of fantasy

* The underlying mythology of Middle-earth

* Tolkien's strange and wonderful beings

* The historical framework of Middle-earth

* Middle-earth's diverse languages

In its broadest sense, geography is the study of the physical features of the world as well as its biological and cultural characteristics. When attempting to deal with the "geography" of a fantasy world like Middle-earth, as envisioned by J.R.R. Tolkien, you're almost compelled to use this wider definition, even if your only goal is to get an overview of its many features. For Tolkien's Middle-earth is never just one of physical geography filled with strange lands, weird creatures, and unfamiliar cultures. As Tolkien conceived it over the better part of his life, Middle-earth is also a world rich in its own mythology, history, and languages.

This chapter gives an overview of the various worlds that await you in your journey to Tolkien's Middle-earth, while at the same time familiarizing you with how these realms are covered in the rest of the book. It opens by exploring the questions of where exactly Middle-earth is located and why Tolkien chose the name Middle-earth for his fantasy world. The chapter then looks at Middle-earth as a fantasy realm in light of Tolkien's ideas on the importance of fairytale in our lives. The chapter concludes with an overview of the creatures, history, and languages with which Tolkien filled his world of Middle-earth.

Where in the World Is Middle-earth?

You may well wonder why it's important at all to locate Middle-earth. Does it really matter whether Middle-earth is a future world in another galaxy or a Europe long gone? Would it really detract from your enjoyment of Bilbo's journey to the Lonely Mountain or Frodo's quest from the Shire to Mount Doom if you found out that Middle-earth were nowhere on this earth?

I happen to feel that Tolkien drew Middle-earth so well in The Hobbit and told the story of The Lord of the Rings so tightly that it wouldn't matter a whit if he had started off either story with the now famous declaration from George Lucas' Star Wars saga, "Long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away ..." On the other hand, coming to know how much Middle-earth owes to past European sagas, legends, and languages can only enhance appreciation of his works and deepen understanding of their many lessons.

Associating Middle-earth with our world and not some alien planet or invisible dimension was very important to Tolkien. When pressed for the location of Middle-earth (as fans and critics continually did), Tolkien often replied that Middle-earth most definitely refers to lands of this world. In his letter commenting on a review of The Lord of the Rings by W. H. Auden, he wrote, "Middle-earth is not an imaginary world." He then declared that his Middle-earth is "the objectively real world" as opposed to an imaginary world such as Fairyland or invisible ones such as Heaven or Hell.

In another letter responding to a draft of a Daily Telegraph article for which he was interviewed, Tolkien said that the stories in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings take place in the "north-west of 'Middle-earth,' equivalent to the coastlands of Europe and the north shores of the Mediterranean." He then went on to fix some of the primary locations in his books by stating that if you placed Hobbiton and Rivendell at the latitude of Oxford (which was his intention), then Minas Tirith, some 600 miles south in Gondor, would be at approximately the same latitude as Florence, Italy. This puts the Mouths of the river Anduin and the ancient Gondorian city of Pelagir at about the same latitude as the fabled city of Troy (made famous in Homer's heroic epic poem the Iliad and located on the west coast of modern-day Turkey).

To get an idea of these spatial relationships, see Figure 1-1, which shows the western coastline of Middle-earth and points out the specific parallel locations that Tolkien pinpointed in his letter. From this map, you'd be hard pressed to match any of Middle-earth's physical features with those of modern-day Europe. Tolkien would have explained this obvious discrepancy as the result of changes in coastal geography during the time that has elapsed since his epic adventures took place. To me, it's sort of like the difference between Earth's Jurassic age and the Middle Ages - not too much looks the same, but it's the same old Earth.

The Meaning of Middle-earth

In the letter commenting on a New York Times book review, Tolkien stated that the name Middle-earth is a "just a use of Middle English midden-erd (or erthe), altered from Old English Middangeard, the name for the inhabited lands of Men 'between the seas' ..."

The origin of the term "Middle-earth"

Midden-erde (or erthe), however, is good old Middle English for "middle-earth." As Tolkien pointed out, it hails from an earlier form, middangeard, which literally means the "middle yard" in Old English or Anglo-Saxon, the language Tolkien taught at Oxford University. Middangeard was taken to mean, like oikumenos, the "inhabited world." It is rumored that Tolkien first happened upon this term as an undergraduate student when he read the following lines in Crist (Christ), an Old English poem attributed to a bard named Cynewulf:

[infinity] ala [infinity]arendel engla beorhtast ofer middangeard monnum sended

In my translation, this reads, "Hail, Earendel, the brightest of angels sent to the world of men!" In this early form, Middle-earth was not only the inhabited lands in the midst of the encircling seas, but also the middle ground between Heaven above and Hell below. This vertical dimension of the early European Christian Middle-earth is entirely missing from Tolkien's - even though you'd be hard pressed to find a more devout Catholic Christian.

"Stuck in the middle again ..."

At the time when The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings take place, the inhabited lands of Middle-earth are surrounded on three sides by wastelands and on the west by open sea. To the north lies the Ice Bay of Forochel, and beyond that is the frozen Northern Waste; to the east is Rhûn, populated by the barbaric Easterlings. To the south you find the vast deserts of Harad, populated by dark-skinned peoples called the Haradrim ("Southerns"). In The Lord of the Rings, both Easterlings and Southrons often make war on the free peoples of Middle-earth and are allied with Sauron, Dark Lord of the eastern realm of Mordor, who is the greatest threat to freedom in Middle-earth.

On the west, many of the lands of Middle-earth, just like many lands of Europe, have borders that adjoin the sea. According to Tolkien's thinking, at the time of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, you could sail west and not find any other land masses (you certainly wouldn't discover the Americas). In earlier ages, though, sailing directly west would bring you to the island of Númenor, the ancient homeland of the people who end up settling the northern and southern coasts of Middle-earth. And west of Númenor lay the continent of Aman - the so-called Blessed Realm or Undying Lands (see Chapter 2). Aman is where two types of immortal beings, the Valar and Elves, dwell together. By the Third Age, the one in which The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings take place, the island of Númenor has sunk beneath the sea, and Aman, removed from the physical plane of the world, is accessible only by the magic White Ships of the Elves (see Chapter 12).

Viewed from this perspective, you can start to understand how the peoples of Tolkien's Middle-earth perceive their lands as being encircled by limiting forces, some of which are hostile. This viewpoint is perhaps not so unlike the Anglo-Saxons before they came to Britain, when they still dwelt along the northwestern coast of Europe in the lands now known as Denmark and northwest Germany. At that time, they were surrounded on three sides by potentially hostile tribes and the open sea on the other. The situation didn't change much when they got to England, except that the sea was mostly at their back with the hostile Celts in front and on either side of them. I think that much of the orientation of Middle-earth's geography is rooted in the perspective of Tolkien's Anglo-Saxon ancestors, whose language he knew so well.

Middle-earth as a Fantasy World

Fantasy is an attempt to create a complete, imaginary world with its own creatures, cultures, and lands that are governed by their own set of physical laws and guided by their own morals and principles. For Tolkien, fantasy was definitely akin to the world of the fairies. Fairy comes from the Middle English faerie, perhaps related to Old English faeger, meaning "beautiful," "lovely," and "fair." Tolkien's fairy world, although certainly containing its share of Elves and Dwarves, diverges greatly from the modern view of fairies as diminutive folk - the "little people" of many fairytales. In Tolkien's Middle-earth, you find no brownies, pixies, Tinkerbell-like fairies, or Snow White-type Dwarves. Moreover, his trolls don't charge to cross their bridges, although his dragons do breathe fire and his wizards have magic staffs.

In place of pointy-shoed Elves dressed in green like bonnie leprechauns and Dwarves in floppy stocking caps shouldering pickaxes and singing "Heigh-Ho, Heigh-Ho," Tolkien presents tall, shining Elves with a complex, not altogether beautiful history side by side with serious Dwarves who not only delve into caves but create magnificent underground cities

Interestingly enough, Tolkien's mythology may well explain the modern, Disneyesque view of Elves and Dwarves as the natural outgrowth of the great stresses to which his fairy world had been subjected. For the Middle-earth of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings is in the throes of a great upheaval, a battle between good and evil that threatens to foist the race of Men (Tolkien's term, not mine) onto center stage as the dominant culture at the expense of the other beings of Middle-earth.

As a result of this transition, the fairy or magic aspect of Middle-earth in the Third Age - especially as embodied in the Elves - is in danger of disappearing and being replaced by an age of almost total reliance on science and technology, a world as rich in know-how as it is poor in spirit. This is, of course, an age we can all readily recognize, for it is the one we live in.

On the nature of the fairytale

Tolkien had definite ideas about the essential nature of fairytales, which he set forth in a 1939 lecture at St. Andrew's University entitled "On Fairy-Stories." In this lecture, he argues against the demotion of the fairytale to an insignificant tale fit only for children (or very childish adults). Doing so, he argues, is neither fair to the stories nor the children.

According to Tolkien's lecture, a good or successful fairytale exhibits three important structural characteristics: