Tolkien - Punk: the War of the Ring was so long ago that the stories are generally considered myth and allegory as much as history, and in any event the hard-working Men, Dwarves, Hobbits and Orcs of Middle-Earth and the Eastern Lands have other things to do than speculate about mythology.
The renewed Kingdom of Gondor and Other bits fell a long time ago, and much of the world is now run by Republican or Parliamentary governments of one stripe or another, although the Empire of Mordor is ruled by a hereditary Necromancer (albiet largely a nominal ruler nowadays: they needed national symbols to rally around when they revolted against Gondorian tyranny, and Sauron had been dead long enough for his identification with Ancient Evils to seem mere Gondorian propaganda).
Hobbits and Goblins/Orcs have essentially second-rate status in society.
The autonomy of the Shire was not respected in the later, decadent eras of the Gondorian Empire, and they did not have a nice ring-wall of mountains like the inhabitants of Mordor. Hobbits are scattered through the human world, as far east as the Golden Empire (whose inhabitants still find it annoying when Westerners make "if it it wasn't for us, you'd all be speaking Orkish" claims) and as far south as the backwards jungle kingdoms. Some independent Hobbit clans still exist in remote areas, carefully hiding from Men, but most muddle along in human society, working in jobs where an unusually fine skill with hand and eye are needed. In a few of the more modern republics they are theoretically equal to Men, but this tends to be of the "seperate and" variety. They survive, though: privation has sharpened their "tough as old tree-roots" tendencies, and they at least avoid the worst stereotypes of specialized minorities: others exist to draw hostility from them.
Most notably the Orcs. Although most died when Sauron was overthrown, he'd been overthrown before and some Orcs made it: evolution in action, so to speak, with the Orcs better able to survive sans the influence of Evil Overlords doing the best. And Orcs breed rapidly. The orcs have not had a kingdom of their own in the West since the Dwarves finally cleaned out the now Balrog-free mines of Moria, and exist on the ass end of society, doing the shittiest jobs for the lowest pay. Centuries of mass executions and brutal repression have to some extent beaten the more agressive tendencies out of Orcs, although it is still generally considered unsafe to turn your back on one. Some countries have at times exterminated their Orc populations, but they have always survived somewhere, and bred up their numbers again. To the east, in the Orocarni mountains on the borders of the Golden Empire and in the wild borderlands of Haradwaithe some small Orcish kingdoms survived up to the modern era, only to be stamped out by modernizing states with gunpowder armies and tunnel-smashing explosives. Only in Mordor, which has always supported an indigenous Orcish population, even in the worst times after the War of the Ring, do Orcs have a recognized and accepted social status, and even serve in the Mordorian Armed Forces, which shocks and disgusts most foreigners.
Dwarves are disliked too - greedy, keep to themselves, violent-tempered, their women are ugly - but they have equal recognized status to humans. Although Moria is the only large Dwarf state left, large dwarf communities exist underneath many a state of Men, and dwarves are if anything more skilled at the modern Alchemical and Material arts than humans are. Fighting modern armies underground, in tunnels too low for you to stand up in, and in the dark...well. Dwarfish communities in Human states generally have important legal and economic autonomies, and usually have massive economic power as well: Humans may have begun the Alchemical Revolution, but Dwarves have always had a leg up in practical applications for manufacturing, etc. Only the relatively small numbers of the slow-breeding dwarves keep them from dominating the economy of Middle-Earth: indeed, some suggest that the _real_ reason they don't is not their numbers, but that they are too wise to unify humans against them by showing them what they really could do. In the Tyranny of Rhun, Dwarves have no more rights than anyone else, but that's probably largely due to the fact that the vast and flat country has never supported much of a Dwarf population.
Trolls were wiped out a long time ago, and the only remaining dragons are shrunken creatures, no longer capable of speech and found mostly in zoos. The Ents, alas, long ago gave up on the Entwives, and mostly 'went tree' (the Old Forest was burned to the ground a long time ago, but there are still some patches of woods east of the Misty Mountains which are never cut). A few mobile Ents still exist, though, protectors of those woods set aside as nature reserves by enlightened countries; few see them, and many are dubious as to whether they actually exist or are some sort of magical creation of Big Government. There are some giant spiders still hiding out in the jungles of the Dark lands, but they keep their existence carefully secret. (poor Shelob's stuffed carcasse was thrown out by the Mordor Imperial Museum three centuries ago: it was getting too threadbare, and most visitors didn't think it was real anyway).
The Cursed Marshes on the borders of Mordor were filled in a long time ago, and grow a lot of sugar beets nowadays.
Technology is odd, since it is mixed in various ways with magic. There are no elves or wizards any longer with inherent magical powers, but there are symbolic magics of rune and symbol that work for ordinary Men or Dwarves: there is necromancy: and there are a variety of special alchemical and material-handling methods that slop into magic on one end and chemistry on the other, many of which were pioneered by the dwarves. Over the last few centuries, something of a 'scientific revolution' has taken place among Men, fuelled by the printing press and new seaborn explorations of the Southern Lands and the mysterious "Dark Lands" to the SE of Middle-Earth. The practical aspects of the enterprise have quickly been duplicated by the Dwarves. Magic, engineering, alchemy: all on an organized, experimental basis.
Crude golems and steam locomotives. Magical Palantir-type seeing stones and high explosives. Dirigibles and skysrapers structurally stregnthened by a hundred thousand runes forged into the metal. Dead who reveal their killer in speech (when a killer with foresight has not smashed brain and cut out tongue), and steam-powered carnival rides. Soldiers go into battle with gunpowder rifles, but all their bullets are carved with mystic runes to make sure they go through dwarf-forged body armor. Movies and water purification plants which require blood sacrifices.
Tom Bombadil is currently "some crazy old guy" living in a cabin in the woods. State social workers occasionally go to make sure he's ok and not violating any provisions for living on public land, but never quite manage to put together a coherent report afterwards.
Currently, half a dozen great powers, including the Republic of Eriador and its allies in Moria, the Tyranny of Rhun, the backwards but huge Golden Empire, and the small but oil-and-minerals rich and strategically important Mordor are contending for influcence and power, and people fear another great war, as bad or worse as that provoked by colonial struggles in the Dark Continent, may be coming. There are those who hope to unify the lands in a greater project, though: to break through the Dimensional Barrier and reach the Unknown Lands.
For a long time, it has been a puzzling fact that all efforts at calculating the circumference of Arda came up with a measurement several thousand miles greater than what was actually observed by ships crossing the Great Ocean westwards. And then, only a few years ago, an alchemically powered rocket equipped with an Eye of Seeing was launched from Eriador, circled the globe, and water-landed in the Gulf of Lune. And what the Eye observed was alarming.
From orbit, a whole new continent was revealed that, as far as could be told, people crossing the ocean somehow just missed. Theoretically, sorcery could twist space so to conceal another continent, but the power involved was almost beyond comprehension. So, countries now race to build rockets of their own to observe this new and mysterious land, while the rulers of Mordor have their own, bigger plans: they intend to be the first to land _people_ from orbit, to see if the twisting of space prevents an approach from above. There are, of course, those who forsee disaster if any contact is made with the presumably super-powerful inhabitants of the western continent.
One thing nobody knows is that there are still some Elves in Middle-Earth. Most people think the last of them left over a millenium ago, and are familiar with them only from literature, comic books, and neatly labeled skulls at the museum. However, there were some who loved the land too much to leave, and still walk the land, disguised by magic to seem as mere humans...and they _really_ don't like the notion of humans dropping into the Holy Lands sans invitation. Countries have been flooded for less.
Bruce
