I've always thougt of ME as a legend. It is partially true, but very biased. Orcs are not that easy to kill, and probably not as ugly as they are described. There is no magic, no ringwraiths, sauron was maybe just a powerful man, and the sauron spirit eye thing was another powerful man or something... And as people passed on this legend the story was altered and changed a lot. But in reality this story is just a bunch of made up ........ that I and many others think is very interesting, and it is made up so well that people think it is real...
And as for parallel universes, I personally dont believe in them. But I think it could be possible... But when people say "if you would have done this, something else could happen etc..." Well... they did not do anything differently so nothing different happened... I dont think my decision will start another PU or anything

If we live in Middle Earth, in which age are we? While reading Tolkien's books I get a strong feeling that his work was inspired from Hindu Mythology (I don't know about Greek as I haven't read anything about that). According to Hindu Mythology, there were four Ages. First three ages were like I read in The Silmarillion. Good- evil, elves(there were magical creatures mentioned like Elves),monsters etc. It all is supposedly true as there are many evidences found and it has hardly happened that something of their presence can be ignored. Forth Age was ours i.e. Men's (and women's), and now there's no more magic, nothing. All this makes me believe that we do live in ME. Or ME was inspired from our world.

According to Professor Tolkien in Letters "I imagine we are actually at the end of the Sixth Age, or in the Seventh."

I wouldn't be too concerned about Greek Mythology, as Professor Tolkien's primary interest in this regard would be, I would argue, Norse Mythology. A system of ages occurs in many European systems of belief as well, including early medieval Anglo-Saxon ones, with which Professor Tolkien would of course have been very familiar. Medieval people so named their era as they believed they were living in a 'Middle Age' between the pre-Christian era and the forthcoming Kingdom of God. I suppose a system of ages might be one of those cultural artefacts embedded in the beliefs of numerous Indo-European cultures.

Middle-earth was indeed meant to be "our world." More from the Letters:
"imaginatively this 'history' is supposed to take place in a period of the actual Old World of this planet."
"The theatre of my tale is this earth, the one in which we now live, but the historical period is imaginary."
"I have, I suppose, constructed an imaginary time, but kept my feet on my own mother-earth for place."
Although I believe this was an idea that bothered Professor Tolkien more and more as he got older and noticed that there couldn't be much consistency between this and scientific knowledge of astronomy, geology and so on (the Sun obviously had to exist before photosynthetic plants, for example; nor could the geography of the world change so substantially between the end of the Third Age and now, a time period he considered to be "about 6000 years."

maybe ME is how our world could have been if religion and industry hadnt destroyed all the magic. If the Romans hadnt destroyed the Celtic culture, killed all the Druids. If materialism hadnt destroyed the simple life.