What is the relation of Middle Earth to the Earth we live on? Is this discussed in the books?
Please warn if your answer gives away something in the book.
They’re the same place.
No, they aren’t. Seen any elves lately?
Some people like to say that Middle Earth is our Earth in the distant past. Tolkien did not support that idea from what I’ve read (I recall seeing something about him being amused at the concept when it was raised to him).
Personally, I think it’s got the same relationship with Earth as Never Never Land and Oz do. 
I saw something about this on someone’s LOTR site. I was very interesting----BUT---- I can’t remember where the site is. Anyway, they took the map of Middlw Earth and somehow fixed it over the earth to compare .
If you put the Shire in approximately where London is, Mordor would be about where Albania/Macedonia is today. Minas Tirith would be about where Venice is. I was doing a search on maps of Middle Earth when I ran across this site. They have a map of ME superimposed over a map of Europe so you can visualize the distances involved.
If I could put up a picture, I would post it. I saved it to my 'puter for reference while reading the books.
Tolkien made up a mythology, principally to amuse himself, that was supposed to be sited in the Northwest of the Old World of Earth at a point significantly in the past that coastlines and mountain ranges have changed in the interim.
What does that matter? The book continually makes mention of the fact that the age of men is coming, and that of dwarves, elves, et. al are fading and dying away.
This question is very clearly answered in The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien He says something to effect of “Middle-Earth is not so much an imaginary place as it is an imaginary time.”
Read Letters. It’s really good!
Read Book of Lost Tales V. I-II and you’ll see how middle-earth fit into the world as we know it. Mythically, basically. Tol Eressea was to become England in his original concept, but for that it was going to be towed back to middle-earth from the Blessed Realm
(Letter #211, To Rhona Beare, 14 October 1958)
Is this the map you’re talking about? It’s a little tough to read, but there ya go.
It has been pointed out, however, that Mirkwood and Fangorn Forest are on the wrong side of Misty Mountains.
Great forests tend to be on the windward side of great mountain ranges, as opposed to the leeward as it would appear to be in Middle-Earth. Given that the sun rises in the east, and sets in the west in Middle-Earth as it does on Planet Earth.
I remember Aragorn said something about how he had travelled all over Middle Earth, as far as Rhun (or was it Harad?) “where the stars are strange”. What does that imply? Rhun looks as if it is on the same latitude as the rest of Middle Earth, and Harad isn’t far enough to the south for that to be the case–unless maybe Middle Earth straddles the equator.
And the coastlines and such of Middle-Earth themselves changed over the course of the stories in The Silmarillion, didn’t they?
If memory serves, this assertion is supported by the narrator’s comments (to the reader) in the opening sections of The Hobbit, in which it is said that hobbits live in our world, but go to some lengths to stay out of our way.
Let me see if I can find the specific passage I’m thinking of…
Anyway, my readings have always left me with the overall impression that Middle-Earth exists in some misty, mythical part of our own past, and that some part of that past exists right alongside us today.
That’s one of the sadly ironic elements to the conclusion of LOTR: Sauron is destroyed, but the elves also depart Middle-Earth. The world becomes safer, but more ordinary.
Regarding this irony, I think a thread started by I am Sparticus on this topic is worth revisiting. From the OP:
Well, there was that little bit where Earendil slew Ancalagon the Black, who fell from the sky; the impact drove the continent of Beleriand beneath the sea…
Now THAT is an archer…
I do believe that Middle Earth is the same Sol III that we live on… see, in the Prologue of LOTR (“Concerning Hobbits”) - something to the effect that the few hobbits who are left now live where they have always lived, in the northwest of the old world.
Has anybody attempted to fit all of Middle Earth onto England? I’m no geography wiz, but it does look to me like the west coast of Middle Earth looks a lot like the west coast of central England. I’d find it hard to believe that the distances would match (England too small?), but again…
One last thought: Tom Bombadil mention something about “the seas being bent” when the Numenoreans tried to sail to the undying realms. Maybe a bit of a reach here, but perhaps the world, in Tolkien mythos, was flat until the fall of Numenor? One way to make the undying realms disappear, but still exist, would be to make the world into a sphere(?)
Wasn’t that the point? All of the elves sailed off into the west.
Engywook and Terminus Est, I’d recommend the first 90% of this thread as recommended reading.