Tolkien asserted his deep conviction that language and myth are inseparable one from the other; each being the outgrowth of the other; each dependent on the other for its essential meaning. The paired notions that a world created by the language that describes it generates the language of the world it describes led him directly from his study of real-world myths in their proper languages (including Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, Finnish and Breton) to his invented world and the languages he developed for its peoples’ expression.
