JRRT actually wrote the original Lost Tales as a supposed "Mythology for England" but that concept was abandoned before Lord of the Rings was published. The Hobbit was originally an independent work that used elements of the older stories to provide "flavour", and Lord of the Rings grew out of a sequel to the Hobbit which was in it's own turn drawn back to the older stories.
Much of this is described in Letter 131:
I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story-the larger founded on the lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser drawing splendour from the vast backcloths – which I could dedicate simply to: to England...
The Hobbit, which has much more essential life in it, was quite independently conceived: I did not know as I began it that it belonged.
At the time when he wrote the Quenta Noldorinwa, published in History of Middle-earth 4 and roughly contemporaneous with his writing of the Hobbit, the concept was that the British Isles were leftovers from the destruction of Beleriand in the War of Wrath, as Christopher Tolkien notes in his commentary:
...it seems plain from the conclusion of Q that England was one of the great isles that remained after the destruction of Beleriand...
Of course, the stories of the Second and Third Ages didn't exist at that time (although the Fall of Numenor was shortly to be written), so this idea - in serious disharmony with the geography of Lord of the Rings - is not the contradiction it may seem to be at first.
As the mythology developed JRRT abandoned this idea, and came to view north-western Middle-earth as being a pre-historic, (possibly pre-Ice-Age) Europe, as is well-documented elsewhere, e.g on this site.
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