Middle Earth

Idyll by Jo Bradford

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Cornwall is a place of rolling green landscape and turquoise sea. It is so enchanting. This land of fluffy clouds, quaint stone cottages and majestic trees are all exactly how I imagined Middle Earth to look, as a child reading Tolkien. His stories of the shires and villages of Middle Earth, were inspired by the British Midlands area where he grew up around Warwickshire and Herefordshire.

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The idea of a middle earth comes from Old Norse Language and appears in ancient Germanic mythology.

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The world of Men is known by several names in Old Norse, such as Midgard, Middenheim, and Middengeard, and is located in the centre of the universe. It was believed that Bifröst, the rainbow bridge, extended from Middle-earth to Asgard, the land of the gods. Beneath Middle-earth lay Hel, the land of the Dead.

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Old Norse was spoken by inhabitants of Scandinavia and inhabitants of their overseas settlements such as Britain, during the Viking Age, until about 1300.