British scholar J.R.R. Tolkien is the creator of the fictional realm of Middle Earth, the setting for his fantasy novels The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, among others. He was a founding member of the literary discussion group The Inklings, along with friends and fellow authors C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams, and Tolkein's own son, Christopher. He's widely considered to be responsible for the resurgence of contemporary interest in fantasy writing, what some consider to be "high fantasy."

Tolkein was born in modern South Africa, what was then known as the "Orange Free State." He moved to England at age 3 after his father died of rheumatic fever. Tolkein enlisted in World War I after graduating from University of Oxford, surviving the Battle of the Somme but contracting what was then called "trench fever." While recovering from his illness, Tolkein began working on some of the ideas that would transform into his most famous stories.

Middle-earth is the modern form of the Old English word middengeard, an ancient Germanic name for "the habitable world of men". Tolkien used this name for the world of his stories, claiming it was set in "an imaginary time in our world's past".

Tolkien originally set out in 1916 to create a "mythology for England", a pseudo-scholarly attempt to construct an Anglo-Saxon mythology that incorporated and explained many words which had come down from Old English.

After working on the mythology for nearly 10 years Tolkien changed direction around 1925 and began developing a fictional ancient northern world called Beleriand in which new versions of his adventures were set.

By 1935 Tolkien had been amusing his children with made up stories for several years. He began merging those stories into his more mature mythologies, including the Beleriand mythology, and began calling the new world "Middle-earth".

Tolkien formally adopted Middle-earth as the setting for The Lord of the Rings, which was a sequel to his popular children's book The Hobbit. All subsequent writings on matters relating to his Elvish and Hobbitish stories were set in Middle-earth, which continued to evolve as Tolkien filled it with more details.