Making it real.

[Amarie of the Vanyar]

Didnt JRRT originally set it up as the whole ME story come from a man called Elfwine, who by accident came upon Eressea and was befriended?

Yes, but he also explored other possible ways for learning the stories of the first ages, as time travelling [img]smilies/wink.gif[/img]

I always liked to think that the age of JRRT's ME was in an epoch between earlier ice ages, where glaciers literally wiped away from the face of the earth any remnants of the old world

In fact Tolkien placed the end of the Third Age at about 6,000 years in the past, that means that the stories are after the ice ages, and before the worldwide flood. There is an interesting thread talking about this:
http://forum.barrowdowns.com/cgi-bin...c&f=1&t=001437