Excellent topic, Kinstrife. If I may say so, I'm glad that you're dead and haunting the Downs. I believe that Tolkien's desire to bring his created world in line with the real world means that he would eventually have had to write a transition story. Incredibly he managed to work it into the huge tale of the Ring. I think the book in general was a rare inspiration of genius, a literary version of E=mc² (but fortunately the book hasn't been used to make atomic weapons).
If LOTR had not existed we may have had instead a short story, something similar to the Cottage of Lost Play, which described how the elves came to leave Middle-Earth or fade away, and how the blood of the Númenóreans gradually became mingled. Without such a transition, I think that the created world would appear pure fantasy as for example Raymond E. Feist's Krondor, or blindingly unrealistic, as C.S. Lewis' Narnia. I think the realism, and the blending in to our own world, is one of the major attractions of Tolkien's work.
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But Gwindor answered: 'The doom lies in yourself, not in your name'.
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