[Beanamir of Gondor]

Originally Posted by Nerwen

Still, the "magical realism" label does guarantee that the book at least won't be a stereotyped sword-and-sorcery yarn. There's a point to that– much of the fantasy section of any bookshop consists of third-rate Lord of the Rings rip-offs, with a few D&D cliches thrown in.

I just had that revelation wandering around the local library yesterday. It was incredibly depressing.

Originally Posted by Feanor of the Peredhil

Magical realism, by existence, requires a more layered approach to story telling. Since literatis beg for layers [like parfaits; or onions], they can dig their sharp dirty little claws into magical realism, confident in that one of their first little club rules is being followed.

As I was reading through the introduction to the Book of Lost Tales Part I, at one point Christopher Tolkien says that his father was reluctant to even introduce the Silm to his readers:

"I am doubtful myself about the undertaking [to write the Silmarillion.]. Part of the attraction of the L.R. is, I think, due to the glimpses of a large history in the background: an attraction like that of viewing far off an unvisited island, or seeing the towers of a distant city gleaming in the sunlit mist. To go there is to destroy the magic, unless new unattainable vistas are again revealed." J.R.R. Tolkien, Letters p. 333

There we have it from the Professor himself. As Feanor said, there are so many layers upon layers upon layers in Tolkien's works that we can't even begin to consider them in light of a modern genre: even magical realism, to be perfectly honest. Tolkien started at the bottom: he separated his world from ours by giving it an entirely new language system, and then moved on to creating characters, plots, etc. Middlearth operates on a completely different plane of reality from ours: it has histories upon histories (I like Feanor's example of Eomer) that we can't even begin to touch. Even when we have the Silm, there's still places in Beleriand we don't visit, times in Valinor where we have no idea what's going on--and yet, fundamentally, we feel as if this alternate world, this other plane of reality, has a history, practically a persona just as great and researchable as our own, because Tolkien continues to give us those "glimpses". Trying to write literary analysis of Middlearth from a pragmatic view just doesn't happen: you would have to live there to do so.
From another point of view: I intensely enjoyed reading Weis and Hickman's Darksword Trilogy, and the same with Piers Anthony's immensely complex Phaze and Proton series, yet at the same time I never felt a need to know the specific backgrounds of those worlds. Sure, they hated non-magic-users like Joram: but I never particularly cared why. Phaze and Proton had a cooperative past that stretched millenia back: but why didn't I care about it? Riddle me that.
Bleargh. I've said more than my share. But if I may make another allusion, you can tell fans of the Star Wars Expanded Universe that their beloved literature is subjectable to literary criticism, because it's not all written by one person, and can be split into seperate authorial/directorial points of view. Despite the fact that there are layers upon layers of histories behind the motivations of the main characters, Star Wars was essentially created by one man and expanded upon by hundreds, thousands of others. It's a cooperative project, with many, many contradictions.
On the other hand, Tolkien (with his equally grand and layered history of Middlearth) has the advantage over SW: if he didn't imagine it happening in ME's history, it didn't happen. There is no Tolkien "canon": just Tolkien's writings.