Any fiction – but above all a work of fantasy – is a world made of words, ‘A world,’ as Ursula K. Le Guin has said, ‘where no voice has ever spoken before; where the act of speech is the act of creation.’ There is no Middle-earth, no Dorimare that lies beyond a barrier, a veil of words; no window heaped with goblin fruit for sale. No ‘faery-lands forlorn’ exist unless the casement is the spell. The glass is language; and the glass is all there is.

For the most influential of modern fantasists, that glass was a telescope, trained on origins.

Etymon

Fairy tale and philology have been entwined since Jacob Grimm first studied both, the linguistic root-stock inextricable from Briar Rose's hedge. The sleeping beauty of the past awaits the scholar seeking it, undaunted by the thorns. Grimm's study, etymology, derives from etymon: the true name of a thing, its first form. Origin is seen as authenticity; the eldest is most true.

J. R. R. Tolkien conceived of Middle-earth as a reconstruction of a lost world. Philology, he thought, ‘could take you back even beyond the ancient texts it studied. He believed that it was possible sometimes to feel one's way back from words as they survived in later periods to concepts which had long since vanished, but which had surely existed, or else the word would not exist.’ He hung his mythology on these *-words – the asterisk marks conjecture – in the spaces between words, as if imagining his constellations from a scattering of stars.