Tolkien for discussion of his inspirations and sources). Middangeard occurs six times in Beowulf, which Tolkien translated and on which he was arguably the world's foremost authority. The word Mediterranean comes from two Latin stems, medi-, amidst, and terra, (earth/land), meaning 'the sea placed at the middle of the Earth / amidst the lands'.
It is Germanic for what the Greeks called the οικουμένη ( oikoumenē) or 'the abiding place of men', the physical world as opposed to the unseen worlds ( The Letters of J. Rather, it comes from Middle English middel-erde, itself a folk-etymology for the Old English word middangeard ( geard not meaning Earth, but rather enclosure or place, thus yard, with the Old Norse word miðgarðr being a cognate). The term 'Middle-earth' was not invented by Tolkien.
