The fictional land where most events of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings take place is Middle-earth. It is the central region of Arda, Tolkien’s imagined world, during the period in which the novels’ main events occur.
Middle-earth includes the Shire, Rivendell, Rohan, Gondor, Mordor, and many other lands. Its peoples include Hobbits, Elves, Dwarves, Men, Ents, and Orcs. The term is Tolkien’s rendering of an old Germanic and English concept for the inhabited world between heaven and the underworld.
Middle-earth is sometimes incorrectly used as the name for Tolkien’s entire universe. Arda is the larger world, while Aman is the western continent that includes Valinor. Númenor is a separate island kingdom from an earlier age. The Lord of the Rings is therefore set mainly in Middle-earth, but its mythology extends far beyond it.