What fictional world is the setting for most of J.R.R. Tolkien’s major stories?

Middle-earth is the fictional world setting for most of J.R.R. Tolkien’s major stories.

Middle-earth is a region of Tolkien’s larger imagined world, Arda, rather than the name of the entire planet or universe. The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are both primarily set there, as are many stories later collected in The Silmarillion and other posthumous works.

Its peoples include Hobbits, Elves, Dwarves, Men, Ents, and Orcs. Important locations include the Shire, Rivendell, Moria, Mordor, and Gondor. Tolkien developed the setting over decades through stories, maps, histories, and constructed languages.

The name is sometimes mistakenly treated as a synonym for modern Earth. Tolkien connected it to the old expression middangeard, but in his mythology Middle-earth is the central inhabited region of a mythic version of the ancient world.