The Professor did not simply write a masterpiece and trust it to eternity. He was carried there carefully, deliberately, and continuously by systems that kept his work alive long after it should have faded into the dust covered editions of library back shelves. Christopher Tolkien built the canon. Rankin/Bass passed it to a new generation. Gary Gygax turned it into a living system people could inhabit. Each reinforced the others. Remove any one of them and Tolkien weakens. Remove all of them, and he doesn’t disappear overnight but he would have done what every other “great” writer eventually does. He fades.