The Real Middle Earth
Though its meaning may have shifted over the centuries since its Anglo-Saxon origins, ‘middle earth’ is far from fantasy.
One of the most engaging books I have read this year is A Little Learning: A Victorian Childhood, by the novelist Winifred Peck (1882-1962). Looking back from the 1950s, Peck describes her education at a number of different schools in the last decades of the 19th century – a time when the opportunities available to women, and ideas about how girls should be educated, were changing very rapidly.
Though she came from a scholarly and successful family (her father was a bishop), Peck’s chequered educational experiences reflect the gendered restrictions of her day. Some of the schools she attended were firmly early-Victorian in attitude, with no aspirations for women beyond demure wives and mothers. Others, more forward-thinking, were beginning to give girls an academic education equal to their brothers, and to fit them for careers in the world. It is astonishing to be reminded how much things changed for women in not much more than a century. Peck was very conscious of the revolution her generation had witnessed.
One phrase Peck uses in recalling her earliest religious education caught my eye: she describes her first perceptions of spiritual belief as a ‘childish crystal world in a safe centre of middle earth’. ‘Middle earth’ is, of course, a phrase now indelibly associated with J.R.R. Tolkien, but Peck uses it several times in her novels. As a product of this late Victorian upbringing, what did the phrase evoke for someone like her?
The origins of ‘middle earth’ go back to the Anglo-Saxon word middangeard. The second element, geard, does not mean ‘earth’, but refers to an enclosed area of space (like its modern descendant, yard). Comparable to Midgard in Norse mythology, it is the ‘middle enclosure’ which is the home of humans, distinct from Asgard, dwelling-place of the gods, and Utgard, an outer realm where giants live.
Probably the Anglo-Saxon word originally had a similar cosmological meaning, but it was incorporated into a Christian worldview and is widely recorded in Old and Middle English. Over time, geard was replaced by the more familiar earth. If you asked a medieval English-speaker what ‘middle earth’ meant, they likely would have just said ‘the world’, the place where we live. Many of the medieval uses of the term are surprisingly ordinary. A 14th-century romance about Alexander the Great observes, matter-of-factly, that learned people ‘have divided this middle earth into three regions: Europe, Africa and Asia’.
What did they think ‘middle earth’ was in the middle of? The sense is that our world is located between other, invisible realms. That might mean heaven and hell, but it could also be understood in terms of physical space: ‘middle earth’ is not the unknown reaches of the sky, nor the secret abyss beneath the ground, but the area in between, which humans can perceive with our own eyes.
After the medieval period the phrase took on different connotations, coming to be used mostly in the context of fairy belief. Now it suggested the mortal world as seen from a non-human perspective: in The Merry Wives of Windsor, a character pretending to be a fairy exclaims (of Falstaff): ‘I smell a man of middle earth!’ It is particularly well attested in Scotland, where records of early modern witch trials speak of mortals being ‘carried away out of middle earth’ to live in fairyland. People with second sight, it was said, could see fairies mingling with ‘middle-earth men’ right next to oblivious humans.
In the early 19th century this usage was popularised by Sir Walter Scott, who frequently uses ‘middle earth’ to denote the mortal world as distinct from Elfland. Through Scott’s hugely popular works, Victorian children like Winifred Peck might learn to think of themselves as ‘inhabitants of middle earth’ – dwellers in a world apparently mundane, but with porous borders to other spiritual realms.
A Little Learning was published in 1952. Two years later the first part of The Lord of the Rings appeared, and after that no one would ever again be able to say ‘middle earth’ without thinking first of hobbits. But middle earth is not a place of fantasy; it is our world, seen from a different perspective. One of its defining features is that – unlike heaven, hell, or fairyland – it is a place of continual change: ‘All the things of this middle earth are ever turning and changing here’, as one 12th-century poet wrote. Women of Winifred Peck’s generation knew that better than most.
Eleanor Parker is Lecturer in Medieval English Literature at Brasenose College, Oxford.