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Couldn't it be possible that all this stuff Tolkien wrote about might be based on true events- events that happened long long ago? Remember what they said in the beginning of the movie? 'History became legend, and legend became myth, and things that should not have been forgotten, were.' or something like that.
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Professor Tolkien very specifically set his work in our own world. The concept that all of his myth took place in our own history, or before it, was central to his writing.
From a letter to the Houghton Mifflin Co., 30 June 1955:
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'Middle-earth', by the way, is not a name of a never-never land without relation to the world we live in (like the Mercury of Eddison). It is just a use of Middle English middel-erde (or erthe), altered from Old English Middangeard: the name for the inhabited lands of Men 'between the seas'. And though I have not attempted to relate the shape of the mountains and land-masses to what geologists may say or surmise about the nearer past, imaginatively this 'history' is supposed to take place in a period of the actual Old World of this planet.
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From his notes on W.H. Auden's review of
The Return of the King, 1956:
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I am historically minded. Middle-earth is not an imaginary world. ... The theatre of my tale is this earth, the one in which we now live, but the historical period is imaginary. ... Mine is not an 'imaginary' world, but an imaginary historical moment on 'Middle-earth' – which is our habitation.
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From a letter to Rhona Beare, 14 October 1958:
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I have, I suppose, constructed an imaginary time, but kept my feet on my own mother-earth for [i]place[/]. I prefer that to the contemporary mode of seeking remote globes in 'space'. However curious, they are alien, and not lovable with the love of blood-kin.
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From a letter to Charlotte and Denis Plimmer, 8 February 1967:
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The action of the story takes place in the North-west of 'Middle-earth', equivalent in latitude to the coastlands of Europe and the north shores of the Mediterranean. But this is not a purely 'Nordic' area in any sense. If Hobbiton and Rivendell are taken (as intended) to be at about the latitude of Oxford, then Minas Tirith, 600 miles south, is at about the latitude of Florence. The Mouths of Anduin and the ancient city of Pelargir are at about the latitude of ancient Troy.
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[ April 07, 2002: Message edited by: Bruce MacCulloch ]
[ April 16, 2002: Message edited by: Bruce MacCulloch ]