Worth noting: the author, Kirill Yeskov, authored a great book on the Earth history and the old theories of it. And the reasons he wrote The Last Ringbearer, according to his (now deleted) blog, were 1) the geology of Tolkien's world was impossible, the landmass had to be bigger, 2) if the orcs were an army, there must have been a country, a money system, a bureacracy, a developed economy, and so on. From that country's perspective, the elves were a small bunch of rioters on the fringe of the empire.