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I'd just read an article this past weekend that explained the timeframe and source material. I'm not a huge Tolkien fan, but this could be interesting.

Previously, this part of the story was most famous as ruins. After the success of his 1937 children’s story, The Hobbit, Tolkien turned his attention back to a volume of Middle-earth history, which his publishers rejected. (A more complete version was published posthumously as The Silmarillion.) So, as the second world war of his lifetime raged around him, Tolkien crafted an adventure about beings from very different societies putting aside their differences to stamp out an overpowering evil. This, of course, was The Lord of the Rings. In that story, an unlikely fellowship ventures into Mordor to destroy Sauron’s ring. Along the way, Tolkien wanted the characters to pass through a scarred landscape full of the remains of the many civilizations and battles that had come before. Their journey, after all, was not about confronting a new danger but finally eradicating an ancient one—a scourge of malevolence that had tormented the land for eons. Tolkien dreamed up whole kingdoms, then collapsed them for background. The effect worked almost too well. After the publication of The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers—in July and November of 1954, respectively—readers became obsessive. “Most people want more (and better) maps,” Tolkien wrote to a friend in 1956. “Musicians want tunes and musical notations. Archeologists enquire about ceramics, metallurgy, tools and architecture…. Historians require more details about the social and political structure.” To give them everything, Tolkien informed his publisher, “would require a book at least the size of Vol. 1.” Instead, borrowing from his rejected Silmarillion, he squeezed thousands of years of history into about 150 pages of postscript, which became known as the Appendices. These timelines, genealogies, and notes on language and culture became so important to Tolkien that he even stalled the publication of the final book, The Return of the King, to complete them. “They play a major part in producing the total effect,” Tolkien explained to a foreign publisher in 1961, “producing the compelling sense of historical reality.”

The whole article is here if anyone is interested.