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I've often wondered how in this section from "A Long Expected Party" got past the editors:
And there was
also one last surprise, in honour of Bilbo, and it startled the hobbits
exceedingly, as Gandalf intended. The lights went out. A great smoke went
up. It shaped itself like a mountain seen in the distance, and began to glow
at the summit. It spouted green and scarlet flames. Out flew a red -golden
dragon - not life-size, but terribly life-like: fire came from his jaws, his
eyes glared down; there was a roar, and he whizzed three times over the
heads of the crowd. They all ducked, and many fell flat on their faces. The
dragon passed like an express train, turned a somersault, and burst over
Bywater with a deafening explosion.
Middlearth doesn't have trains!
Middle-Earth is our own Earth in an imaginary past.
The Third Age in which the War of the Ring takes place, is supposed to be c. 6,000 before our own time and the unnamed narrator speaks to us, well, an early-to-mid Twentieth Century 'us', in our own idiom. Beorn, for instance, is described, IIRC, as having a voice 'like drums and guns', despite firearms never being directly mentioned in any of the narrative.
More generally, Tolkien's narrator is a modern--if old-fashioned and bookish--storyteller re-telling the events laid down in the Red Book of Westmarch:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Book_of_Westmarch
Besides which, although the concept of industry is invariably painted in negative colours, there are suggestions that Númenor was industrialised, the goblins were skilled in mechanised 'devices' and Saruman seeks to turn the Shire into a post-feudal 'modern' society.
Edit: From The Hobbit:
Now goblins are cruel, wicked, and bad-hearted. They make no beautiful things, but they make many clever ones. It is not unlikely that they invented some of the machines that have since troubled the world, especially the ingenious devices for killing large numbers of people at once, for wheels and engines and explosions always delighted them, and also not working with their own hands more than they could help; but in those days and those wild parts they had not advanced (as it is called) so far.
That's more developed that you might have come away thinking, another tie between this legendary past and our present, plus an indication ('since', 'in those days') that the narrator is of our age, not that of the events he narrates.
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