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Just a quick post before I finish reading the rest of the thread:
As someone early in the Thread/Topic observes that Tolkien doesn't say anything about the Elves, or Men of Gondor mining..... And thus we are to "suspect" whether they "mined" for anything.
Yet Tolkien also does not say very much about the Agriculture needed to support the populations involved, nor does he say anything about the populations needed to support the armies he mentions in passing.
Yet if we are examining Middle-earth as if it is an actual Sub-Creation (and thus a Real Place in some Existential Reality), then these sorts of things exist.
We have to constantly be on guard against the Pop-Cultural derivations of Middle-earth (I hear some Kiwi guy made some movies loosely based upon Tolkien's work - One should be cautious when looking at Pop-Culture), and their portrayals as creating stereotypes that deviate from what Prof. Tolkien describes (and there is more in his descriptions than just the words themselves, and their order - those words themselves are clues to other things about Middle-earth).
Tolkien seems to have thought of Middle-earth as a living, breathing world, in which people (Elves, Humans, Dwarves, Hobbits, Orcs, Ents, Dragons, Demons, etc.) lived.
And this means that the Infrastructure of life must also exist within Middle-earth for these people.
MB
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