Is Arda earth?

[Essex]

Bombadil, take a look at the Atlas of Middle Earth. It has an interesting view, using maps, on how the lands of today were changed from those of the 3rd age.

[Gil Galad]

I always thought of Arda as another Plain of existance.

[Melilot Brandybuck]

Ah I also wondered if Arda was Earth or somewhere in another galaxy.

Therefore the Shire must be where I live...We have moorland with heather. We have an inn in our village called The White Horse (ok not exactly The P. Pony but anyways). A field neighbouring ours has a barrow. I've yet to see a barrow wight but if I ever get my nerve up I may go up there and snoop around one foggy day. We have picturesque rolling countryside traversed by little streams and little woodlands. And what convinced me was the fox I sometimes see trotting about our fields.

[Bêthberry]

I thought that our world and the one of Arda were seperate?

It is perhaps not inappropriate to mention here Tolkien's lecture "On Fairy-Stories." For him, the act of writing fantasy or "sub-creation", to be truly successful, needs to draw upon a sense of touchstone with our own l ives.

Probably every writer making a secondary world, a fantasy, every sub-creator, wishes in some measure to be a real maker, or hopes that he is drawing on reality: hopes that the peculiar quality of this secondary world (if not all the details) are derived from Reality, or are flowing into it. If he inded achieves a quality that can fairly be describe by the dictionary definition: inner consistency of reality', it is difficult to conceive how this can be, if the workd does not in some way partake of reality. The peculiar quality of the 'joy' in successful Fantasy can thus be explained as a suddent glimpse of the underlying reality or truth.

According to Tolkien's biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, preparing this lecture gave Tolkien a renewed sense of purpose in writing LOTR. The lecture suggests that Tolkien's very purpose was to create a Middle earth which felt like it was 'real,' was part of our own world in earlier times.

[Hookbill the Goomba]

We are supposed to live in Seventh Age right now.

Correct me if I am well of course, but I heard that, in one of the HoME books Christopher Tolkien referees to the birth of Christ and "It hailed a new age of the earth" was I lied to? Or does this mean that we are now in "The first age of Christ" or something like that?

[Sharkû]

Christian references in the History of Middle-earth are very vague at best, such as in the Atrabeth. There's no instance of anything as concrete as what you mentioned, unless I'm gravely misremembering or blatantly ignoring something obvious.

[Legolas]

was I lied to? Or does this mean that we are now in "The first age of Christ" or something like that?

Maybe you were confusing that with reality...the "age" we're in has been referred to as AD, Latin 'anno Domini' - "in the year of our Lord."