Q: Is Middle-earth Supposed to be Midgard?
ANSWER: Virtually everyone agrees that J.R.R. Tolkien drew extensively on medieval Norse influences when constructing the world of Middle-earth, but when readers ask if Middle-earth is supposed to be Norse mythology’s Midgard, the answer scholars usually provide is inadequate (at least in the short form).
The name Middle-earth is, according to Tolkien himself, a modernized form of Old English (Anglo-Saxon) middengeard, which was the Old English form of the word that eventually became Midgard in the Norse language (Old English and Old Norse branched off from the same northern Germanic language group).
Midgard literally means “the middle enclosure” and it is used to describe “the world inhabited by men”. Tolkien himself usually translated middeneard and midgard as “the habitable lands of men”. However, the name also corresponds to the mythological geology that the ancient Germans and Scandinavian used to describe the world.
And one must understand that mythological stories are not fiction; that is, they are not intentionally made up “fantasy” stories such as The Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. In the purest sense of the world, a mythology is a collection of stories or explanations that attempt to describe a natural thing (usually a world, its cultures, and its history).
So it helps to think of a classical mythology as the body of knowledge that a culture possesses of its world, described in terms that are meaningful to that culture (usually in religious terms). The mythological names and explanations are all associated with real things but the details themselves may be combinations of real details and embellishments. The embellishments may begin as innocent story-telling flourishes that somehow become fixed in the popular body of explanations and beliefs.
Hence, when the ancient Scandinavians and Germans spoke of men inhabiting “the middle world”, they were describing the physical world they could see — which extended outward in all directions — and beyond which they believed lay other similarly physical worlds. They buried the remains of their dead and so the “underworld” (a physical place) became associated with death. The northern peoples believed that three worlds (the world of men, the world of frost giants, and the world of death) were very closely connected by the roots of a great tree, Yggdrasil. Only the gods could see the tree, which was sacred to them. Much of what we know about Norse mythology, however, comes from Snorri Sturleson and his contemporaries, who lived centuries after the Viking period began (Circa. 800 CE) so one must take these legends with a grain of salt. They are most likely highly evolved and embellished by Sturleson himself or the poets from whom he learned the stories.
We know that the Norse (and probably the Germans) believed that the world of men was physically circular, surrounded by a sea and that beyond that sea lay other lands inhabited by gods (Aesir in Asgard and Vanir in Vanaheim), giants (in Jotunheim), Light Elves (Alfar in Alfheim), Dark Elves (Svartalfar in Svartalfheim), the (subterranean) world of Hel (the goddess of the dead), and the primordial Frost and Fire regions (respectively in the north and south). Together, these were the Nine Worlds: the world of Men (Midgard) surrounded by seven worlds, all above the ninth world (the world of the dead).
Technically there was a tenth world, what we would call “heaven”, and an eleventh world, which is usually described as “the void”. The Void lay beyond all the known worlds and was the source of every world known to men.
Of course, modern science does not recognize the existence of Aesir, Vanir, Jotuns, Alfar, Svartalfar, or an underground world inhabited by dead bodies. These worlds — as described in mythologies — represented the worldview of peoples about things beyond “the land of men” that somehow interacted with “the land of men”. Gods, we believe, represented the great forces of nature and the passions of mankind: wind, sea, war, love, death, family, etc.
So, if the gods are metaphors for the things that drive us or our world, where do the other things fit in? Giants may be used to explain the massive neolithic monuments scattered across the world, built by ancient, long-forgotten cultures that were probably destroyed, driven off, or absorbed by the ancestors of the Germans and Scandinavians. The Elves and Dwarves may represent memories of those ancient cultures. But this is all guesswork.
What we know is that when ancient northern men looked around them, they literally saw “the middle enclosure (of men)” and believed that there were other places where other people dwelt or had withdrawn to that retained some connection with “the middle enclosure (of men)”.
In developing his stories, J.R.R. Tolkien definitively set them all in some inspecific “past time” of our world, and so he felt it useful (helpful, even) to use midden-geard in a modern form as a name for the world in that imaginary ancient time. Unlike our ancestors, however, Tolkien was only trying to tell a rollicking good story that seemed complete and as nearly believable as possible. Our ancestors simply tried to put the pieces of an incomplete puzzle together and ended up telling some rollicking good stories nonetheless.
Still, Tolkien’s Middle-earth is not the setting of Norse sagas and Germanic mythology. It is probably best described as “an imagined precursor” to the world that ancient Germanic and Scandinavians believed they knew and described with their mythologies. In the English-speaking cultures we do not think of our world as Middle-earth or Midgard — we simply think of it as “Earth”, a spherical world inhabited by men, drifting in the void of space. Midgard and Middengeard represent how our northern ancestors described the same world, not fully knowing what its physical shape was.
See also
Is Middle-earth A Country or A World?
Is Middle-earth Supposed To Be Midgard?
Where On Earth Was Middle-earth?
Where Did J.R.R. Tolkien Find the Name ‘Middle-earth’?
How Long Did It Take to Create Middle-earth?
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