In rereading and rethinking davem's initial reply to my verbosity-bomb, I believe I stand by my original statement that an author without a reader is meaningless. If the author writes for himself and his pleasure alone, then the author and reader are one. It would border on insanity for an author to create something which he never expected to consider or even remember later on. After creation, or in Tolkien's view
subcreation, the unpublished author
becomes the reader, pehaps inspired by his work to create further works, as indeed was the case with Tolkien.
As I noted previously, Tolkien
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essentially created the corpus of Middle-Earthian history and literature as a place in which his invented languages could "live." -- his linguistic sandbox, if you will. Again, if we confine ourselves to Authorial Intent, LOTR is a rousing success in and of itself without any readers.
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In that sense he *did* create Middle Earth for himself. But it would be strange indeed if he did not read it over himself and take pleasure in it, preferring instead to ignore that over which he took so much time and effort.