Middle Earth

See also: middle earth, middle-earth, Middle-earth, and Middle-Earth

English

Alternative forms

middle earth, middle-earth, Middle-earth, Middle-Earth

Etymology

From Middle English middelerthe, myddyl erthe; an alteration of earlier middel-erde, middelerd; in turn an alteration of earlier middenerd; from Old English middaneard (“Middle Earth”), variant of middanġeard (“Earth, the world”, literally “the middle yard, enclosure, or realm”) mis- or reinterpreting its meaning, from Proto-Germanic *midjagardaz, ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *médʰyos (“middle”) and *gʰórdʰos (“enclosure”). Cognate with Norwegian & English Midgard (q.v.) and Danish, Norwegian, & Swedish Midgård.

Proper noun

Middle Earth

(archaic) The Earth.
(chiefly Norse mythology) synonym for Midgard, the world of traditional Germanic cosmology, conceived as a realm between heaven (Asgard) and hell (Niflheim).
(fiction) Alternative form of Middle-earth: the setting of the Lord of the Rings series.
- 1994, Academic American Encyclopedia, Grolier, →ISBN, page 141:
  Not only are there maps of fantasy, such as those of Oz or Middle Earth, there are also hypotheses that have been made on the basis of mapped information
- 1999, Frederick Turner, Shakespeare's Twenty-First Century Economics: The Morality of Love, Oxford University Press, →ISBN, page 180:
  The place might as well be called Noplace; it is a sort of magic island, like Thomas More’s Utopia or Homer’s Ogygia or Aristophane’s Cloudcuckooland—or Oz, or Narnia, or Middle Earth, or Disney’s Magic Kingdom.
- 2003, Erik Bethke, Game Development and Production, Wordware Publishing,, →ISBN, page 76:
  Some game ideas (such as the fanciful recreation of Middle Earth where the whole world is modeled with strong AI, 3D graphics capable of great indoor and terrain rendering, where an unlimited number of players can join in on both sides of epic conflict between good and evil) cannot be reconciled with the business parameters […]
- 2004, Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, W. W. Norton & Company, →ISBN, page 27:
  This is not an account of the Middle Ages, nor is it a tale from Middle Earth. This is our world.

Related terms

Translations

Earth — see Earth

Midgard — see Midgard

Middle-earth — see Middle-earth