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Originally Posted by Frodo Baggins
The term came from the concept of having Heaven above, Hell below and Earth in the middle.
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Norse mythology had something like that. The separate worlds hung on the great tree Yggdrasil, so that Middle-earth, Midgård, was litterally in the middle, between all the other worlds, progressively getting worse on the way down the tree and better on the way up. Please correct me if I'm wrong, Nordic members of the Downs. The worlds were on a tree, no?
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Originally Posted by Frodo Baggins
In fact, the Mediterranian sea still preserves this name: Medi-terra-nea "Sea of Middle-Earth".
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I always considered Mediterranean to rather mean "the sea in the middle of the land", with medi=middle, terra=land, meaning surrounded by land, as opposed to the oceans that encircled the land (these would be the Atlantic, Pacific, etc., surrounding the Europe/Africa/Asia world of the Romans and other peoples before America's discovery).