[combatmedic]

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

Yeah, but that's not what JRRT had in mind. For the purposes of his story, ME is the actual, physical past of the real world, in that world your time machine would take you back to Mordor and Gondor. Yes, it's fiction, but it's not fiction set in any sort of imaginary plane. It's as 'real' on its own terms as the starship Enterprise or the Morlocks/Eloi.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle-earth

Tolkien wrote many times that Middle-earth is located on our Earth.[1] He described it as an imaginary period in Earth's past, not only in The Lord of the Rings,[2] but also in several letters.[3] He put the end of the Third Age at about 6,000 years before his own time,[4] and the environs of the Shire in what is now northwestern Europe (Hobbiton for example was set at the same latitude as Oxford),[5] though in replies to letters he would also describe elements of the stories as a "... secondary or sub-creational reality" or "Secondary belief".[6] During an interview in January 1971, when asked whether the stories take place in a different era, he stated, "No ... at a different stage of imagination, yes."[1][7] However, he did nod to the stories' setting on Earth; speaking of Midgard and Middle-earth, he said: "Oh yes, they're the same word. Most people have made this mistake of thinking Middle-earth is a particular kind of earth or is another planet of the science fiction sort but it's just an old fashioned word for this world we live in, as imagined surrounded by the Ocean."[1] He continued to make references to its being "... a brief episode of History" of Earth as late as Autumn 1971.[8]

If this article is correct, he sometimes he described more or less the way you describe it and sometimes he described more as I see it.

Like the moral nature of the Orcs, or even their origins, this may be something he saw differently at different stages in his writing and afterward.