help me understand

[Firefoot]

Originally, it wasn't the Shire that was meant to be England but Tol Eressëa. There is a lot about this in the Book of Lost Tales 1&2.

bilbo_baggins: Not all of the parts in Middle-earth correspond to parts of our world. There are just similarities. Not too long ago, this map was posted on a thread. Go here to see it. This should clear up some of your questions.

[haltred]

I do not believe that JRRT had spefic places in mind for each place in Middle Earth. Though one might think Shire = England and so forth. BUT I think Tolkien was reaching back to the legends of most of Europe . Those of Roland , of the Viking sagas , of the Wagnerian ring cycle, those of Arthur and Alfred.
And the lands could be anywhere in Europe but I don't think he planned it that way. I think it is what our imaginaton makes it.

[The Saucepan Man]

The Shire was meant to be England

To be more specific ...

'The Shire' is based on rural England and not any other country in the world - least perhaps of any in Europe on Holland, which is topographically wholly dissimilar.

(From The Letters of JRR Tolkien - Letter 190)

And getting even more specific:

It is in fact more or less a Warwickshire village of about the period of the Diamond Jubilee ...

(From Letter 178)

The village in question being Sarehole, where Tolkien spent his early years after returning with his mother from South Africa in 1895, and the said Diamond Jubilee being that of Queen Victoria in 1897.

[Olorin_TLA]

Yeah, but it wasn't meant to be physcially in the same place as England. ;) Along the same latitude though, to account for the same climate.

The Third Age of Middle-earth is meant to end at some (imho, an almost-touchable-yet-just-unreachable) point before the dawn of recorded history, so says Tolkien. He gave an exmaple of around 6,000 years ago, as back then that was when "recorded history" "began" in depth...however, that was just an example, bascially, LotR is set before, but not hugely before, our earliest history, so whenever a new archaelogical find is found, just shift the date of LotR back a bit. ;)


EDIT: Yikes! I accidnetally said that Men arose 150,000 years ago. This was a MISTAKE. It's roughly 57,000 according to HoMe X (which puts each "Year" in the SIlmarillion before the rising of the Sun as being 144 sun-years long...and also places the birth of Man all the way back to slightly before the Great March)...somehow I'd got "c.50,000" mixed up with 150,000...hmm.


Also, Tolkien later wrote that perhaps he could have made the geography of LotR fit better with Europe's, had he had that specifically in mind at the time of writing. (Note how the land around the icy Cape of Forochel has a similar shape to Scandanavia). Frnakl,y though, letting the sotry and geography design themselves allowed for greater freedom, and a better LotR...for a start, there would have been no Mordor as we know it! :eek:

[Isowen]

I have heard many rumors, and questions about this. The most popular one seems to be that Middle-Earth is in fact based on England. I am not what you call learned but I do have the answer.
Middle- Earth is not an imaginary place. It is Europe. The name Middle-Earth comes from the Middle-English term Middel- erthe which is the name Europeans called their land hundreds of years ago. As Tolkien says in the Prologue to LOTR, those features on his maps do not match those of Modern Europe, because it has changed over time but there's no doubt about a few points of origin.
To answer your other question, Tolkien estimated that Frodo's quest to destroy the ring took place about 6000 years ago, by our calender.
Just a quick fact to finish off; The 'black land' of Mordor is located where you now find the Black Sea.
But I may be wrong

[Olorin_TLA]

Just a quick thing: Middle-earth wasn't a country or Europe, but the Norse term for the entire mortal world, sandwiched, in the middle, between Asgard above and the lands of fire and ice below.