[William Cloud Hicklin]

I think the LR is certainly written from a very Northern/Teutonic POV, but that doesn't mean that everything in it must correspond to peoples who spoke a descendant of Primitive Germanic. Certainly the Haradrim and Easterlings don't; the former have very clearly a Saracen/Persian flavor, and what little we see of the latter suggests Slavs.

Similarly, Gondor was (to our main characters) foreign, the great but distant and nearly legendary civilization of which most had heard but few visited. Its climate and vegetation are very explicitly Mediterranean, its scale and architecture unparalleled in the North; why shouldn't it occupy the same place relative to our protagonists as Constantinople to the Anglo-Saxons, the great if somewhat decayed capital of the surviving half of the mighty Empire which had once ruled their own land??