Fun article, but I think the connection to Middle-Earth is tenuous at best. I had hopes that there was going to be some interaction between trolls and humans, but he ends up just using the tree-like beings.
They were then confused why their measurements of distances always agreed but of position always differed, until someone came up with the rotation equations that allowed one to map day to night and night to day.
Change normal trigonometric rotation to hyperbolic, and you've got most of special rel.