Gil-galad was an Elven-king. Of him the harpers sadly sing: the last whose realm was fair and free between the Mountains and the Sea.
The Balrog
© Ted Nasmith
The evidence of our past is all around us, in the buildings, the landscape and even the language we speak. Part of the interest of fantasy worlds is in the feeling that outside the story there is even more legend and history.
Tolkien had already written a lot of stories set in Middle-earth before he wrote either the Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings. He continued to work on them throughout his life. These stories were mostly about the history of the Elves. They were published after his death as The Silmarillion.
The characters in Lord of the Rings know some of this ancient history, but it is not always explained to the reader. They know the story of Beren and Luthien, and they know what happened to Numenor, but we do not. Just as in the real world, some things are taken for granted because everyone is familiar with them. The stories we learned as children do not need to be explained because 'everybody knows that'.
Turambar & Glorund
© John Howe
Of course for the creator of a successful imaginary world, this means a huge amount of writing which may never appear fully in the story.
But there are also things mentioned in Lord of the Rings we will never know anything more about. In Moria, Aragorn says Gandalf is 'surer of finding his way home in a blind night than the cats of Queen Beruthiel'. But who was Queen Beruthiel, and what was so special about her cats? There were five wizards, but we only hear of three: Gandalf, Saruman and Radagast. What happened to the other two wizards who went East? Even Tolkien didn't know the answer to that!