What does the sixpence = ?

[littlemanpoet]

I've been reading Tom Shippey's JRR Tolkien: Author of the Century for the last couple of weeks (yeah, Im a slow reader). In writing about the spittingly mad and irrational attitude of the literati towards Tolkien's works, he says this:

On a darkened stage, a single light is burning. A man is down on his hands and knees, crawling round in silence, obviously looking for something. Eventually a second man comes on, and says, after watching for a while, 'What are you doing?' 'I'm looking for a sixpence I dropped', replies the crawler. The second man gets down on his hands and knees and starts to help him. After a while the second man says, 'Just where did you drop it, anyway?' 'Oh, over there', says the first one, getting to his feet and walking over to the other side of the stage, in the dark. 'Then why are you looking for it here?' cries the second man in exasperation. The first one walks back to his original place and starts crawling around again. 'Because', he replies, 'that's where the light is'.

In this allegory of mine, the light = modernism, the crawling searcher = ...any of the critical multitude... . I am not at all sure what the sixpence may =, but Tolkien was out there in the dark, looking for it.

Talk about your punch lines!

What Shippey implies is that Tolkien not only searched, but found it, and has especially through LotR made it available to us. Meanwhile, we're all hard put to say precisely what 'the sixpence' were. It did, after all, take Tolkien all the words of his Legendarium to communicate it. But can we summarize? Any ideas what the sixpence = ?