"Genuine fairy-story" ?

[Lalwendë]

I'm afraid this all makes Tolkien sound like an out and out pretentious Pseud! He did not construct the whole LotR around his conception of the meaning of the word Pity. It's an interesting reading, but is far too reductive. It might in fact be the kind of clever literary trick employed by one of the modern 'literary/Booker-seeking' novelists, but it entirely bypasses all notion of story, which for Tolkien was the driver, certainly as he got older and settled down to writing The Hobbit and LotR. That's how his notion of Eucatastrophe works, as a shocking turn of narrative, not via trickery with language.

Nobody would disagree that Tolkien explores language and works with multiple meanings, but the danger of reading too much into this is to bypass narrative drive. Had LotR lacked this then it wouldn't have been popular except amongst those who maybe wished to impress their tutors with all the 'clever books' they'd read. If you want to find a writer who really does do what you say, go directly to James Joyce and do not pass Go.

Words are objects, and writing is a craft. Tolkien uses words in the same way as any other good writer, recovers older meanings, constructs new ones, plays with them to put together something of his own. Yes, plays, as what Tolkien does is only another way of playing, trying to find layers of old meaning much as a modern writer might play with the multitudes of meaning associated with the word 'black'. That's how the writer uses the creative process and his/her craft, to sweat over pulling together narrative, tone, style, character and meaning. Tolkien does this to no lesser or greater a degree than any other writer. Ultimately it doesn't really matter what modern or ancient micro-theories we apply to his work, its all done in the hope that we can somehow crack the formula and produce something similar, but we won't.

We can't just generalise and say that x, y or z modern writer does not work with words in the same way that we think Tolkien did. On the contrary, modern fiction has far more of this than Tolkien's work has! Possibly why his work is derided so much is that he does not resort to the trickery of the Pseuds, his work with words is subtle and embedded. And it takes a reductive reading to bring that out. On the surface LotR is nowt but a great story, quite different to modern fiction.

And poetry does not 'contain' or limit the meaning and importance of words. If anything it allows them to go free, and these words are more open to exploration and the possibility of recovery.