centres on his idea of ‘sub-creation’. This is most clearly set out in his famous essay, ‘On Fairy Stories’,7 and reveals his affinity with the ideas of Coleridge, MacDonald and Lewis. There he speaks of creating secondary worlds with an ‘inner consistency of reality’. He also stresses the central importance of human language. It was typical of him to write elsewhere in a similar vein: ‘Language has both strengthened imagination and been freed by it’.8 There is, then, an understandable preoccupation