Hi, and welcome, and thanks for your lovely introduction.

You might be best heading for the Tutorials area of the forum, and trying out a couple. I appreciate you'd like to try a Tolkien style (one of my favourites too!) but you will probably learn lots from working through one or two of the others too, as many of the techniques can be reused in different styles once you've figured them out. I can't help you with Campaign Cartographer, but I see Mouse is already on the case in another thread!

Finally, to digress ever so slightly, is your avatar from a Carol Berg novel? It looks very similar.