Tolkien had for years explored his invented languages and scripts as well as real ones. He found the months in 1919-20 working on the New English Dictionary (then at ‘W’) entirely to his taste. The Dictionary, ‘On Historical Principles’, demands for each word that different shades of meaning be distinguished and supported with attributed quotation from written sources, and that the family tree of that word, its cousins and relatives and ancestors in other languages, even extinct ones, be recorded. Tolkien said he learnt more about how languages worked then than in any other period of his career. The coherence of the tongues in LR is greatly dependent on that experience.

Such examination of words raises interesting problems. For example, are words merely sounds, to which by convention we attribute a given meaning, or do they in some way relate to the inner nature of things? Would the word ‘wasp’ – an entry Tolkien wrote – have any meaning if all wasps miraculously ceased to exist? Does the ancestor of ‘wasp’, Anglo-Saxon or Old Teutonic, mean anything when nobody now uses those languages? Is there any connection between the beauty (or otherwise) of the sound of words – to which Tolkien was sensitive – and the meaning? Do (or can) words communicate before they are understood, as Eliot (Selected Essays, 3rd edn., 1951, 238) could argue of poetry? Can one invent a new language that will not import into itself associations and ideas from the ‘real world’? Are all languages governed by the same sort of rules? This is a Chomskyan position which Lewis anticipates: his character Ransom – whose philological expertise seems modelled on Tolkien's – in Out of the Silent Planet (1938, ch. 9), feels he might discover the ‘very form of language itself, the principle behind all possible languages’.

Moreover, the connection between philology, the theory of story, and anthropology has always been close. In the nineteenth century students of folk- and fairy-tale, Märchen, like the brothers Grimm, Jakob (1785–1863) and Wilhelm (1786–1859), who collected what they saw as ‘primitive’ narratives for scientific purposes, were also students of linguistics and the history of language. Jakob formulated in his Deutsche Grammatik (1819–37) the law of mutation of consonants in Aryan languages which is the foundation of modern historical linguistics.