Middle-earth is the fictional continent containing most settings in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.
The story travels through many regions of Middle-earth, including the Shire, Rivendell, Moria, Rohan, Gondor, Mordor, and the Misty Mountains. The term is Tolkien’s rendering of the Old English middangeard, a word referring to the inhabited world in Germanic tradition.
Middle-earth is not the entire planet in Tolkien’s mythology. It is a large region of Arda, the world that also includes lands such as Aman. The setting changes over the fictional ages: Beleriand is an important western land in the First Age but is destroyed and submerged during the War of Wrath.
The name is also often used casually for all of Tolkien’s mythology, but that broader usage can blur the geography. In strict terms, Middle-earth is the central continent associated with the histories of the Hobbits, Elves, Dwarves, Men, and other peoples.