Q: Where and When Did the Hobbit Take Place?
ANSWER: Contrary to what you may have read on the Internet, the events of the Hobbit do not take place in an imaginary world. Many readers cannot help but ask if Middle-earth is real but the stories J.R.R. Tolkien wrote are imaginary adventures that he has placed through literary license about 6,000 years in the past. In October 1958, Tolkien wrote in Letter No. 211:
May I say that all this is ‘mythical’, and not any kind of new religion or vision. As far as I know it is merely an imaginative invention, to express, in the only way I can, some of my (dim) apprehensions of the world. All I can say is that, if it were ‘history’, it would be difficult to fit the lands and events (or ‘cultures’) into such evidence as we possess, archaeological or geological, concerning the nearer or remoter part of what is now called Europe; though the Shire, for instance, is expressly stated to have been in this region (I p. 12). I could have fitted things in with greater versimilitude, if the story had not become too far developed, before the question ever occurred to me. I doubt if there would have been much gain; and I hope the, evidently long but undefined, gap* in time between the Fall of Barad-dûr and our Days is sufficient for ‘literary credibility’, even for readers acquainted with what is known or surmised of ‘pre-history’.
*I imagine the gap to be about 6000 years : that is we are now at the end of the Fifth Age, if the Ages were of about the same length as S.A. and T.A. But they have, I think, quickened; and I imagine we are actually at the end of the Sixth Age, or in the Seventh.
Given this is all just fiction, the fiction holds that Bilbo’s home (the Shire) would correspond approximately with present-day England. That means, therefore, that the events of Bilbo’s adventures in “Wilderland” would have occurred somewhere in north central or eastern Europe.
But it would be more correct to say that The Hobbit takes place in an imaginary eastern European land, just as the Shire is an imaginary ancient predecessor to modern England. Bilbo’s adventures are fictionally placed around 4,000 BCE and are part of an imaginary adventure that caps off an imaginary history that is set in northern and western Europe and adjoining lands.
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