>>45390Actually, Tolkien had a magic system in mind and concrete ideas about how various magical things worked, he just kept it deliberately vague in his published books and tended to go over them mostly in letters and notes. For instance, he says in a letter that each mortal life has a certain lifespan allotted to it, and magical life extension worked by stretching that lifespan out, and as a consequence it sort of gets thinner and, well, stretched out. In the book, Tolkien only vaguely alludes to this, like when Bilbo reaches the great age of 111, and yet doesn't seem to have aged at all, and later remarks to Gandalf "I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread."
In addition to this, there's also the fact that most "hard" magic systems kind of operate like an alternative version of physics, while Tolkien's magic system wasn't anything of the sort and seem to be based on Neoplatonism like a lot of the rest of the book. Like in one part of the book, the Hobbits mention that the elves have magic like Sauron does, causing Galadriel to be somewhat taken aback that they think that the power of the elves and the power of Sauron are the same, but concedes that to those unfamiliar with these things, it would all seem to all just fall under the umbrella of "magic." In a letter, Tolkien explains that the power of the elves comes from the ideal of beauty, while the power of Sauron come from the ideal of control and is related to a type of evil he calls "The Machine." Which is all very different from most other magic systems which, like I said before, tend to be more like an alternative form of physics, while his magic is essentially emanations of Platonic ideals, made all the more obtuse that he deliberately keeps it all vague and mysterious in the books themselves.