I am currently re-reading The Lord of the Rings and thoroughly enjoying it. I’m purposely taking my time, trying to savor it and also hoping to not miss any valuable nuggets as I go. I think this post will prove that out. In my reading, the Fellowship has just arrived at Lothlorien after losing Gandalf in Moria.

In speaking with one Haldir about the fate of the Elves in Middle Earth, Haldir makes a curious statement:

For the Elves, I fear, it will prove at best a truce, in which they may pass to the Sea unhindered and leave the Middle-earth for ever.

I had never noticed any prior reference to “the” Middle Earth, but instead merely Middle Earth. I think it’s a subtle but potentially material difference.

The next day we were reading the BoM as a family and as is often my wont, I try to work in some “cray” or “elf lore” as my wife likes to call it. I do it somewhat tongue-in-cheek so my kids don’t end up completely crazy like their old man but they seem to really enjoy it when I find ways to work it in. If they don’t find it interesting, they enjoy making fun of me at least.

Before we started reading I said “hey does anyone want to hear something crazy?” My wife said “no I don’t think anyone does” to which my kids dissented, saying they definitely did. My wife does this for laughs because obviously who would say no to hearing something crazy?

I told them about Haldir’s statement to which my wife, as she often does, said “yeah and?” to which I replied that I think it implies that there are 3 “earths” and the LoTR takes place in the middle of those 3, kinda like there are 3 kingdoms of glory”. They were all fairly skeptical that Haldir’s statement was meaningful enough to reach the same conclusion.

I didn’t push it, after all, that’s a lot of emphasis on the word “the”. We started reading Mosiah 27 about Alma the younger and the 4 sons of Mosiah. And wouldn’t ya know, in verse 11 we find another curious use of the word “the”:

And as I said unto you, as they were going about rebelling against God, Behold! The angel of the Lord appeared unto them!

In fact, I had previously made a note in my scriptures app noting that it was odd that it says “the” angel rather than “an” angel. King Benjamin used the same phrase. The implication here is that it’s not just ANY angel, but THE angel, who I suppose is Manwe’s herald. Just a guess. But at any rate, I couldn’t believe my luck!

“That’s a sync!” I said. “Now you guys have to believe me about the Middle-earth.”

“What sync?”

“He said ‘the’ angel, not ‘an’ angel, just like I was saying before about ‘the Middle-earth'”

“So what?”

“Don’t you think it’s a little weird that the same odd ‘the’ usage that I just happened to annotate years ago would pop up within minutes of when I mentioned ‘the’ Middle-earth?”

“What does that prove?”

“That I’m right. About everything. Elves are real.” (This was a shocking leap in logic, even for someone so detached from reality as me and we all laughed.)

“So are you closer to God as a result of that sync?”

“Well….”

“That’s what I thought. Ready to keep reading?”

I’m used to this, of course, and I dish out the trolling myself in spades so I don’t mind getting it back.

You could say I lost the battle that day. BUT! Yesterday I thought to check my digital copy of History of Middle Earth and found several references to “the Middle-earth”. In fact, I found a few instances where it was referred to as “the middle-world” which I think is practically a flashing neon sign pointing at a notion similar to Philo Dibble’s drawing:

In another part I found a note where Tolkien had scribbled this on a version of the Ainulindale:

“The World should be equivalent to Arda (the realm) = our planet. Creation the Universe ([illegible] universe) should be Ea, What Is.”

I think the implication is that world = planet and so the middle planet would be the one on which we now reside…I think.

The only more explicit way he could have said it was “the middle planet” but “the middle-world” is pretty dang close. I will admit that there exists the notion of “the old world” to refer to the East and “the new world” to refer to the West so you could say that Europe is the “middle world” because it sits between the West and the lands farther East than Europe itself. But in Tolkien’s cosmology, world seems to mean planet so I’m sticking with Philo’s rough concept personally.

And by the way, I took this new info to my wife and she admitted that’s stronger evidence than I first presented so if it wasn’t an outright theological victory, it was maybe a draw.