Words can create whole worlds. It is a central province of literature to suspend the reader’s disbelief, even when describing the fantastic, the impossible, and the magical. In this talk, I will discuss Susannah Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (2004) and J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring (1954) and their fantastic spaces. I will explore how words can create spatialities that teeter on a knife’s edge between real and unreal, between the mundane and the amazing.