Middle-earth is the fictional land containing the Shire and Mordor in J.R.R. Tolkien’s writings.
Middle-earth is the principal setting of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. It includes regions such as the Shire, Rohan, Gondor, Mordor, Mirkwood, and the Misty Mountains. The stories describe only part of a larger world and a much longer history extending back into the First Age.
The term translates Tolkien’s use of “Middle-earth,” derived from the Old English middangeard and related Germanic ideas of the inhabited world. It does not mean a planet separate from Earth. Tolkien’s legendarium presents the setting as an imagined mythic past of our own world.
Valinor is a blessed land in Aman, west of Middle-earth. Númenor is an island kingdom that existed in the Second Age, while Beleriand was a major region of the First Age that was largely destroyed during the War of Wrath.