[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

I should like to point out at this point that OE middangeard is recorded before the earliest stage of Scandinavian settlement in England, and a matter of centuries before the earliest written occurrence of ON midgarð, so it would be irresponsible to assume that the Norse word influenced the English one. If there was any influence of the Old Norse word upon its Old English counterpart it probably took place during the transition into Middle English, although I prefer to think of the two words as parallel yet separate forms. The suggestion that either developed from the other is tenuous indeed, and it is much more likely that they simply share a common ancestor in Primitive Germanic.

Since Tolkien's primary interest was in England, I would argue that he has used the English term rather than the Norse, although he does draw inspiration from Old Norse language and literature elsewhere in his writings. It is certainly interesting that such places as 'Middle-earth' and 'Mirkwood' appear in all of the Germanic languages of which we have an extensive record. Perhaps the mythology, like the languages, has a common ancestor, which seems to be what Tolkien was suggesting by the projection of these terms into the far past.

Elu Ancalime is right to point out that the inhabitants of Tolkien's Middle-earth would not have known Old English and Old Norse. However, that did not stop Tolkien from using words from those languages, adapting their spelling and writing them into the philology of the elven tongues. Perhaps the oldest name in the Silmarillion is Eärendil, which Tolkien first found in the Old English poem Crist I, but before it could be incorporated into his legends, he had to develop a complete etymology of the word in the Elven language of the time (Gnomish, I should think, in 1916). Certainly in the earlier development of the legendarium, Tolkien seems to have been trying to integrate his legends with the unrecorded early stages of those we know from the Kalevala, Snorra Edda, Sæmundar Edda, Widsið and other medieval sources. Tolkien regularly re-interpreted ancient Germanic mythology in terms of his own, but in 'Middle-earth' he had found a term so universal that it needed no alteration. This is particularly true of this term, since he first published a use of it in The Hobbit, which wears its influences very much on its sleeve.