Tolkien’s Middle-earth perhaps wasn’t a place. It may have been a time in (English) history?
- sciart0
- Jun 30
- 2 min read
Excerpt: There are tons of theories surrounding J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and, more broadly, the fictional world of Middle-earth in which the books take place. One of these theories is that Middle-earth is actually not a fictional world at all, but our own Earth in prehistoric times, before — as historian Dan Carlin recently put it in his podcast Hardcore History — “the so-called Age of Man began.”
This theory has been around for a while, but it’s unclear where it originated from. It’s possible this theory can be traced back to Tolkien himself, who once said he created Middle-earth to provide England with a mythology that could compare to those of the Greeks or the Icelanders. The theory gained traction after a public lecture at the University of Oxford in 2022, titled “On Hobbits and Hominins.” During the lecture, Victorian literature professor John Holmes, alongside archeologists Rebecca Wragg Sykes and Tom Higham, debated how the various races of Middle-earth — men, elves, dwarves, orcs, and hobbits — could be taken as analogies for the various hominin species that once coexisted on Earth.
Even if Tolkien helps us conceptualize deep time, this does not mean that his world is supposed to be our own. Admirers of the author know that the events described in Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit span only a fraction of Middle-earth’s known history. Middle-earth itself, as explained in Tolkien’s The Silmarillion, is but one small part of a planet called Arda, created and ruled by a collection of gods that most certainly weren’t around when ancient humans interacted with Neanderthals.
Although Middle-earth is most definitely a fictional place, this does not mean it is completely unrelated to reality. As Tolkien stated in his foreword to Lord of the Rings, “An author cannot of course remain wholly unaffected by his experience.” Upon closer inspection, the theory that Arda is a representation of prehistoric Earth falls apart. But another interpretation of Tolkien’s magnum opus holds up under scrutiny.
This interpretation argues that the various regions of Middle-earth visited in The Lord of the Rings were inspired by, and intended to represent, specific moments in English history.