Tolkien saw himself as engaging in secondary imagination—not merely inventing things, but discovering them. For him, the process of writing was not an act of fabrication but of revelation. He believed he was recording what already existed, not merely making it up. In his own words:
“The thing seems to write itself once I get going, as if the truth comes out, only imperfectly glinted in the preliminary sketch.”
Tolkien viewed his sub-creation as a divinely inspired process, a form of co-creation under God, much like the way a mystic receives divine revelation. He was not merely a storyteller but a medium, bringing forth a mythology that he believed already existed in some realm of truth.