The Middle Earth

Summary

One of the most engaging books I have read this year is A Little Learning: A Victorian Childhood, by the novelist Winifred Peck (1882-1962). Looking back from the 1950s, Peck describes her education at a number of different schools in the last decades of the 19th century – a time when the opportunities available to women, and ideas about how girls should be educated, were changing very rapidly. Though she came from a scholarly and successful family (her father was a bishop), Peck’s chequered educational experiences reflect the gendered restrictions of her day. Some of the schools she attended were firmly early-Victorian in attitude, with no aspirations for women beyond demure wives and mothers. Others, more forward-thinking, were beginning to give girls an academic education equal to their brothers, and to fit them for careers in the world. It is astonishing to be reminded how much things changed for women in not much more than a century. Peck was very conscious of the revolution her generation had witnessed. One phrase Peck uses in recalling her earliest religious education caught my eye: she describes her first perceptions of spiritual belief as a ‘childish crystal world in a safe centre of middle earth’. ‘Middle earth’ is, of course, a phrase now indelibly associated with J.R.R. Tolkien, but Peck uses it several times in her novels. As a product of this late Victorian upbringing, what did the phrase evoke for someone like her? The origins of ‘middle earth’ go back to the Anglo-Saxon word middangeard. The second element, geard, does not mean ‘earth’, but refers to an enclosed area of space (like its modern descendant, yard). Comparable to Midgard in Norse mythology, it is the ‘middle enclosure’ which is the home of humans, distinct from Asgard, dwelling-place of the gods, and Utgard, an outer realm where giants live. Probably the Anglo-Saxon word originally had a similar cosmological meaning, but it was incorporated into a Christian worldview and is widely recorde...