The Professor as scholar

[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

Maybe someone else would know if there was more on Tolkien trying to tie in his mythology with actual medieval history.

The character of Eriol (later Ælfwine) was intended to act as a bridge between Tolkien's legends and our own history. Originally Tol Eressëa was to become England, with Kortirion becoming the city of Warwick (about which Tolkien wrote a poem that by happy coincidence I happen to have been reading today). In the earlier stages of development, the traveller was to have come from Heligoland and his discovery was to pre-date the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons; but later the chronology was changed and the direct correlation between the actual and the invented country dropped. It seems, though, that the intention had been to use a human visit to the island as the one point of contact between medieval reality and the author's imagination, the fruits of which were to be set in the distant past.

Having said that, Tolkien does accredit his characters with the invention of smoking and golf, amongst other things; so we could also regard those as ties between fact and fiction.