Q: Was middle-earth Real?
ANSWER: The depth and detail that J.R.R. Tolkien provides in The Lord of the Rings is really unlike anything most people have read in fictional works written prior to the 1980s. There are so many descriptions of trees, plants, hills, mountains, weather, and land features that the whole world feels like a place where J.R.R. Tolkien had personally traveled.
And, of course, there is a certain truth to that imagery for Tolkien was very much influenced by places he had visited. The Misty Mountains, for example, have often been compared to the Swiss Alps. The Shire looks like the English countryside with rolling green hills and little streams wandering through. Even the Old Forest and Fangorn Forest have been compared to a few wooded places in England such as the Forest of Dean.
In the most literal sense Middle-earth is not real. The stories are simply imaginary tales that Tolkien devised over the course of many years. He used his real-life travels and adventures as guides for filling out the imaginary landscape of Middle-earth.
Ironically Tolkien’s earliest surviving attempt at writing a mythology, The Book of Lost Tales, is supposed to follow England’s landscape carefully in several places. The mythology was supposed to explain how England passed from an ancient, mysterious world filled with Elves and other magical creatures into an island nation inhabited by Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. But Tolkien abandoned this mythological concept and he developed an imaginary land, Beleriand, where he set his rewritten adventures for Elves and Men in a stylish fairy-tale landscape.
When Tolkien developed The Hobbit as a story for his children he described a vague land filled with mountains, rivers, and forests. There was the occasional town, of course, and Elves. When he was asked to prepare the story for publication he created a very detailed map of Wilderland but not of Bilbo’s homeland or the first area where he and the Dwarves had their adventure with the trolls.
When writing The Lord of the Rings Tolkien used the far edge of his Beleriand map as a reference for some of the western lands of Middle-earth in the Third Age. He included the Wilderland landscape he had devised and then extended his imaginary landscape in several directions. Virtually everything on the Middle-earth maps is completely imaginary and does not technically correspond in any way with real locations on the globe.
But Tolkien always regretted using an imaginary landscape, for he had chosen the name “Middle-earth” to imply that the world in which his Hobbit and Elf stories were set was our world, in some imaginary time in the past. Tolkien subsequently suggested some correlations between real-world places and places in Middle-earth but such identifications should not be taken seriously. They are afterthoughts, not markers for a secret map that marries Europe to Middle-earth.
So the short answer to this question is really, no, Middle-earth was not real — at least not the Middle-earth in J.R.R. Tolkien’s books. The name “middle-earth” is real and its historical use was applied to “the habitable lands of men” as opposed to the worlds of the gods (Aesir and Vanir), the dead (Hel), the Dwarves, the Light-elves and Dark-elves (Alfar and Svart-alfar), and the giants of Jotunheim and Muspellheim.
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