shadowy_blue
Senior Member
Middle-earth IS Europe. The name simply comes from the Middle English term Middel-erthe--the name Europeans called their land many hundreds of years ago.
True, Tolkien maps and descriptions of Middle-earth don't follow all the features of modern Europe--for instance, neither the shape of Britain nor today's Atlantic coast are obvious on his maps. As he says in the prologue to LOTR, those features don't match exactly because they changed over time. Still, there's no doubt about a few points of origin. Hobbiton is located--not surprisingly--near Tolkien's home, in Oxford. Gondor is roughly where we now find Italy, though it may extend as far as Turkey.
Tolkien believed that over the course of history, different directions come to mean different things. In England, for instance, East came to be connected with enemies and danger, because of invasions by Scandinavians to the East. Tolkien matches the meaning of the directions in LOTR with the meanings from real European history and legend.
South. In the real ancient world, heading South from Britain sent you towards great empires: Greece, Rome, Byzantium. The same is true in LOTR. Gondor, where humans reign over a great kingdom, is South of Hobbiton, and quite close to those real-life places. South is the direction of civilization, of large nations and complicated politics, as the hobbits learn when they reach Gondor.
North. No surprise here: in legends of northern Europe, the icy north is associated with death. It is where one finds Niflheim, a place of everlasting cold and night, where unworthy souls go after death. As a line in an Icelandic saga goes, "Cold arose out of Niflheim, and all terrible things." This land is the source of LOTR's "Region of Everlasting Cold", in Minas Morgul, home of the leader of the Black Riders, the Witch King.
West For Europeans, west was the direction of mysterym because the vast Atlantic Ocean stood in the way of exploration. Legends grew of magical lands beyond the sea and the people who lived there. The legend of the lost island of Atlantis, an important inspiration for Tolkien, grew from this fascination. According to some stories, people from those lands had crossed the sea to settle in Europe. Tolkien used that idea to explain how certain humans came to Middle-earth and established Gondor. He also relied on these legends when writing about the Undying Lands, or Valinor, part of the home of the angelic spirits, the Valars, Maias, and Elves.
East. Early in LOTR, Gandalf tells Frodo to begin his journey by heading east, "towards danger" (The Fellowship of the Ring,p. 65). Bilbo Baggins also headed east in The Hobbit, towards Mirkwood (where the spiders dwelt) and the Misty Mountains (where the Orcs lived and Gollum hid). For the people of Middle-earth, as for Western Europeans in real life, east came to mean danger because that's where foreign enemies and armies lived. Of course, it's also where one finds Sauron's realm, Mordor.
---The Magical World of the Lord of the Rings-----