Some fantasy works use misspelled words to indicate that the setting of the narrative is different from the real world in certain ways. I was wondering about the history of this practice and what author originated it.
I tend to associate the use of misspellings with works that are somewhat playful about the relationship between their settings and reality. For example, in The King of Elfland's Daughter from 1924 (which is all about happenings on the boundary between the ordinary world and Elfland, especially how things are different on one side or the other; and, moreover, at one point parodies more conventional historical fiction), the Christian religious leader in Erl is the "Freer" (not "friar"). Another example, is in Terry Pratchett's early science fiction novel Strata. When the main character says that "Reme" wasn't built in a day, it is a clue that the universe of the novel is not, as it had up to that point appeared, our own distant future. In both these cases, the words serve to indicate that the environment of the novels are very much like our own world, but also different in some unclear ways. Neither seems to be an example of dialect or prospective changes to English orthography. (Lots of science fiction stories have things spelled differently in the future, but that is usually implied to be an evolution of spelling.)
Moreover, there are plenty of other examples to be found elsewhere. So where did this practice originate?
