The word “shire,” originating from Old English, continues to be used today to denote administrative divisions in Great Britain, such as Oxfordshire. Nowhere in Middle-Earth are English influences as obvious as in the Shire, home of the hobbits.

This is arguably unfair in Tolkien’s case, as he not only taught English at Oxford University but also incorporated numerous aspects of the English language and English history into his fiction. This is probably because he wrote fantasy, a genre which to this day is often dismissed as entertainment rather than Literature with a capital L. The Shire and the Anglo-Saxon migrationĭespite his stature and success, Tolkien has largely been ignored by literary critics. This interpretation argues that the various regions of Middle-Earth visited in The Lord of the Rings were inspired by, and intended to represent, specific moments in English history. But another interpretation of Tolkien’s magnum opus holds up under scrutiny. As Tolkien stated in his foreword to Lord of the Rings, “An author cannot of course remain wholly unaffected by his experience.” Upon closer inspection, the theory that Arda is a representation of prehistoric Earth falls apart.

The theory gained traction after a public lecture at the University of Oxford in 2022, titled “On Hobbits and Hominins.” During the lecture, Victorian literature professor John Holmes, alongside archeologists Rebecca Wragg Sykes and Tom Higham, debated how the various races of Middle-Earth - men, elves, dwarves, orcs, and hobbits - could be taken as analogies for the various hominin species that once coexisted on Earth.Īlthough Middle-Earth is most definitely a fictional place, this does not mean it is completely unrelated to reality. It’s possible this theory can be traced back to Tolkien himself, who once said he created Middle-Earth to provide England with a mythology that could compare to those of the Greeks or the Icelanders. This theory has been around for a while, but it’s unclear where it originated from. One of these theories is that Middle-Earth is actually not a fictional world at all, but our own Earth in prehistoric times, before - as historian Dan Carlin recently put it in his podcast Hardcore History - “the so-called Age of Man began.” Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and, more broadly, the fictional world of Middle-Earth in which the books take place. There are tons of theories surrounding J.R.R.

The hobbit part 1 book