“And language for Tolkien was also the soil from which his literary garden grew, as he explains in a 1966 interview, referring again to “cellar door”: “Supposing you say some quite ordinary words to me – ‘cellar door,’ say. From that, I might think of a name, ‘Selador,’ and from that a character, a situation begins to grow.”

“And language for Tolkien was also the soil from which his literary garden grew, as he explains in a 1966 interview, referring again to “cellar door”: “Supposing you say some quite ordinary words to me – ‘cellar door,’ say. From that, I might think of a name, ‘Selador,’ and from that a character, a situation begins to grow.”

— Philip Zaleski