The Creative Spell of Language: From Tolkien’s Incarnation to the T3 Method The Team Tale

Recently, I read with great pleasure Simon J. Cook’s essay “How to Do Things with Words: Tolkien’s Theory of Fantasy in Practice.”

It’s a piece that, in my view, sheds new light on one of the most fascinating aspects of Tolkien’s thought: his conviction that language is not a mere vehicle of communication, but an act of creation, even incarnation.

Cook’s conclusion is as bold as it is elegant. He argues that after Tolkien’s 1939 lecture “On Fairy-Stories,” new theological and metaphysical ideas began to shape his legendarium: the nature of the Silmarils, the creation of Arda, and even the Ring of Power.

At the heart of this evolution lies what Cook calls “linguistic incarnation.” 

For Tolkien, the act of inventing words was not symbolic—it was a genuine creative act, a form of sub-creation in which thought takes material form through sound.In this sense, Tolkien did not merely write about magic; he performed it through language.

Cook explains that Tolkien’s process mirrors the divine pattern of creation in his mythology: thought and sound give birth to vision and form, spirit is embodied in matter, and art becomes an echo of divine creativity. Even the darker figures of his world, Morgoth and Sauron, imitate this process, corrupting it by embedding their will to dominate into material things.Language, in Tolkien’s view, thus becomes the original “spell,” a bridge between the immaterial and the real.

This idea has resonated deeply with me for years. Long before developing the T3 Method – The Team Tale, I was fascinated by the ancient link between language and creation: the idea that words themselves possess generative power.

Across cultures, from the Logos of Greek philosophy to the sacred utterances of shamanic traditions, speech has always been seen as the act that makes worlds real.Somewhere along the path of modernity, we began to forget this.

That’s precisely why, when I conceived the foundations of the T3 Method – The Team Tale, I chose to return to the power of narrative, to the word as creative act.

In T3 Method – The Team Tale, participants are immersed in a collective story: a shared verbal and symbolic world that allows them to act, decide, and reveal themselves outside the constraints of their daily roles. What happens within that narrative space is not fantasy as escapism, but fantasy as revelation, a form of linguistic sub-creation that unveils authentic behavior.

Paradoxical as it may sound, people often express themselves more genuinely when speaking as someone else within an imaginary world than when performing their “real” roles in the workplace. Freed from hierarchy, they rediscover spontaneity, curiosity, and courage: those creative forces often suffocated by corporate formality.And in that process, solutions that once seemed unreachable begin to surface.Not merely out of the box, but, as I like to say, out of the cage.

What Cook’s essay illuminates, and what I recognize as a guiding principle in my own work, is the profound truth that to speak is to create.Tolkien’s linguistic sub-creation was not an abstraction, it was a working model of how imagination transforms reality through structured language.

That’s the same creative magic the T3 Method – The Team Tale seeks to bring into the realm of human collaboration and organizational life: not to escape the world, but to recreate it.