The lore of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit are complex, and I don’t expect everyone to try and learn everything or understand the nuances of anything. The core rulebook suggests treating Tolkien’s works as an “unreliable narrator” and exploring parts of the story that don’t interrupt established canon. I think that whatever we want to do is good as long as it is fun and cool and we can agree on it. LOTR forms a good background for me to work with, but that doesn’t mean everything needs to be consistent with the thousands of published pages out there.
The Folk of Eriador describes the setting of Eriador and its peoples.
The Shadow of the Past provides a timeline for the game’s setting, with gameplay likely starting at Year 2965. We can discuss this and change this. This does mean that we are about 20 years after The Hobbit and about 50 years before The Lord of the Rings