Middle-earth is the fictional land where much of J.R.R. Tolkien’s legendarium is set.
The name appears in The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and Tolkien’s wider mythology. It refers to a continent or region of Arda, the broader world Tolkien created, rather than to an entirely separate planet. Important locations within Middle-earth include the Shire, Rivendell, Mordor, Gondor, and Rohan.
Tolkien adapted the expression from older Germanic and English ideas such as middangeard, a term associated with the inhabited world. In his mythology, Middle-earth is not simply a fantasy version of a modern map, though Tolkien connected it imaginatively with an ancient past of our own world.
Narnia, Westeros, and Earthsea belong to other fantasy series. Another frequent confusion is treating Middle-earth as the name of the whole universe; technically, Arda is the world, while Middle-earth is its principal inhabited region in the narratives most readers know.