12).6 I could have fitted things in with greater versimilitude, if the story had not become too far developed, before the question ever occurred to me. All I can say is that, if it were ‘history’, it would be difficult to fit the lands and events (or ‘cultures') into such evidence as we possess, archaeological or geological, concerning the nearer or remoter part of what is now called Europe though the Shire, for instance, is expressly stated to have been in this region (I p. As far as I know it is merely an imaginative invention, to express, in the only way I can, some of my (dim) apprehensions of the world.
May I say that all this is ‘mythical’, and not any kind of new religion or vision. And though I have not attempted to relate the shape of the mountains and land-masses to what geologists may say or surmise about the nearer past, imaginatively this ‘history’ is supposed to take place in a period of the actual Old World of this planet. It is just a use of Middle English middel-erde (or erthe), altered from Old English Middangeard: the name for the inhabited lands of Men ‘between the seas'. ‘Middle-earth’, by the way, is not a name of a never-never land without relation to the world we live in (like the Mercury of Eddison). All quotes are from Tolkien's letters (unless otherwise noted): I will allow Tolkien to speak for himself. Middle-earth became Europe, the Shire became Great Britain and Ireland, and the One Ring was destroyed about 6,000 years ago.
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