Middle-earth is the central continent in J.R.R. Tolkien’s legendarium. It is the main setting for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings and for much of the mythology later published in The Silmarillion.
The name is Tolkien’s rendering of the Old English middangeard and related Germanic terms for the inhabited world between different cosmic realms. It does not mean a planet called Earth in the modern scientific sense. Within Tolkien’s imagined history, Middle-earth is part of a world that changes through successive ages.
Important locations in Middle-earth include the Shire, Rohan, Gondor, Mordor, Mirkwood, and the Misty Mountains. The continent’s peoples include Hobbits, Men, Elves, Dwarves, Ents, and Orcs.
Valinor is a separate blessed land across the sea, while Númenor is an island kingdom and Beleriand is a western region of an earlier age. These names are therefore related to Tolkien’s mythology but are not synonyms for Middle-earth.