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I have been reading through The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings again, in the process trying to scrutinize Tolkien's language to tease out what it is about his prose that makes it so muscular, forceful and compulsively readable. I have come up with a partial answer, which may surprise Tolkien fans who think they know Tolkien's writing well:

Tolkien's prose consists almost entirely of words of one syllable. Furthermore, he uses almost entirely native English words. Most of Tolkien's sentences of normal length contain no more than two or three words of two syllables (the possible exception being the word precious). Words of three or more syllables - this applies particularly to words of foreign origin (words descended from Latin or Latinized Greek) - are even rarer; so that when they appear in the text, they stand out and are special, even if the reader perceives this only subliminally. Finally, he uses English words, including words he himself coined, in place of more familiar foreign words, e.g., "unlooked-for" instead of "unexpectedly." Interesting to note that Chaucer did the opposite, e.g., instead of using the perfectly good Middle English word "unhap," he introduced the French word "difficulty" into the language.

And fortunately for us, Tolkien wrote in a language that is ideal for his brand of story. English is a declarative language. In its ability to tell you what happens next, it is unsurpassed. The English author John Masefield wrote a novel entitled "Odtaa." It turned out that that was an acronym for "one damn thing after another."

There are those who would dispute my observations by contending that modern English has evolved into a language where the basic syntactic elements consist of words of one syllable, so that this can be said of all writers in English. (The previous sentence contains 25 1-syllable words, 9 2-syllable words, 4 3-syllable words, and 1 4-syllable word.) This may be true; but if so, few do it so well or so effectively as Tolkien.

Your observation about Tolkien's use of native English words is very interesting.
I noticed that he tends to use words that "sound" right for the type of epic he's writing. I read somewhere that Tolkien's Middle-Earth started when he came across the name of Earendel in one of Old-Saxon poems. It was the sound of this name that enchanted him.

He must have been particularly keen on the sound shape of words. Just like Owen Barfield.