[Bêthberry]

This is simply a side note to the topic here and has little to do directly with the scribal conceit in LotR. But it was pure chance that I came across this article yesterday, likely at the same time littlemanpoet set up this thread. I offer it mainly out of curiosity and to demonstrate that Tolkien's own academic work still is discussed.

What did I find? I found a scholarly article examining Tolkien's scribal practice in editing a manuscript of Geoffrey Chaucer's "The Reeve's Tale" (from The Cantebury Tales). I cannot copy the entire article here, but I will quote some passages. What I omit is mainly the nitty gritty of the argument concerning ME philology, morphology, and specific differences in dialect between Southern/London dialect and Northern dialects.

I cannot verify the accuracy of what the author claims about Tolkien because Tolkien's article is not available online. However, before I bore you with tedious quotations, here are the two relevant references. Perhaps our own active scholars Fordim Hedgethistle and Squatter of Amon Rûh can dig up Tolkien's article and quote it for us if people are curious.

First, Tolkien's article: J.R.R. Tolkien, ‘Chaucer as a Philologist: The Reeve’s Tale’, Transactions of the Philological Society (1934), 1-70.

Second, the contemporary article: S.C.P. Horobin, "JRR Tolkien As A Philologist: A Reconsideration of the Northernisms in Chaucer's 'Reeve's Tale'", English Studies vol 82, no. 2 (April 2001), 97-105.

Okay, here goes with the comments on what were Tolkien's habits/thoughts/assumptions about scribal practice and what contemporary thought is. I omit the footnotes, which is what the numbers at the end of some sentences refer to.

In his analysis of the portrayal of Northern dialect in the Reeve’s Tale Tolkien
assumed that Chaucer was aiming at complete consistency in his representation
of Northern dialect features.1 Tolkien’s article presented Chaucer as a philologist
and argued that his ‘linguistic joke’ could therefore only be truly appreciated
by philologists.2 In the critical text appended to the article Tolkien
attempted to reconstruct a Chaucerian original which was ‘very purely and correctly
Northern’ (16); a text free from the ‘mongrel blends’ and ‘corruptions’ introduced
by scribal copyists with no formal philological training.
However since Tolkien’s article was published a great deal of work has been
done on the text of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, which serves to cast doubt on
many of Tolkien’s assumptions and conclusions. The vast editorial enterprise
carried out by J.M. Manly and E. Rickert based upon a complete collation of
all the extant manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales, concluded that the Hengwrt
manuscript [Hg] preserved a very accurate text, close to the author’s original.3
Furthermore Manly and Rickert claimed that the Ellesmere manuscript [El],
which formed the basis of F.N. Robinson’s edition of 19334 and Tolkien’s critical
text of 1934, had been subjected to a degree of editorial sophistication. Following
Manly and Rickert’s work a number of their assumptions and their
methodology have been called into question, although their belief in the importance
of the Hg manuscript has been accepted by many textual scholars. The
strongest supporter of the Hg manuscript is N.F. Blake whose argument that
Hg represents the text closest to that of Chaucer’s lost holograph led him to use
Hg as the basis of his 1980 edition of the Canterbury Tales.5 Recent stemmatic
analysis of the manuscripts of the Wife of Bath’s Prologue using sophisticated
computer collation software by The Canterbury Tales Project has further served
to assert the primacy of the Hg manuscript.6
In addition to the important textual work that has been carried out since
Tolkien’s 1934 article, we now know much more about scribal practice. Rather
than viewing scribal copies as corruptions of an accurate authorial exemplar, recent
studies have treated these copies as contemporary critical responses to an
author’s language and text. Study of ‘bad texts’ has revealed the significance of
such documents as evidence of ‘the ways in which such texts were read and understood
by their early audiences, to establish an authentic contemporary, or
near contemporary, commentary’.7 In an important article which examines
scribal copies of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, B.A. Windeatt demonstrates
how scribes ‘can offer us the earliest line-by-line literary criticism of Chaucer’s
poetry, a reaction to what in the poet’s text makes it distinctive and remarkable
in its own time’.8
Furthermore the traditional view, as expressed by Tolkien in his classic article
on ‘AB’ language, that the language of a ME text is a product of its textual
history has also been refuted by ME dialectologists.9 Recent approaches to ME
dialectology have demonstrated that scribes in the late ME period regularly
‘translated’ the language of their exemplar into a single consistent variety of
ME.
Thus rather than viewing the language of a ME manuscript as a confused
blend of archetypal and scribal forms, it is now possible to consider such texts
as evidence for a single consistent dialect of ME. In addition it seems that a consideration
of the treatment of the Northernisms by later copyists may offer insights
into how scribes responded to Chaucer’s use of dialect, and how these
responses were affected by the dynamic processes of textual transmission and
linguistic change.

. . . . .

This study has shown that in general scribes did recognise the integrity of the
Northern dialect features to the text of the Reeve’s Tale, and preserved these in
most occurrences. Certain scribes, especially that of Gg, effected a wholesale
translation of these forms, replacing them with current Southern equivalents.
Other scribes responded to Chaucer’s use of dialect by increasing the Northern
flavour of the text. This is particularly apparent in the work of the Dd scribe
who made a number of changes to increase the number of Northern features
within the text. Many scribes attempted to make the representation more consistent
by regularising the text, while a number added Northern features not
found at all in the Hg manuscript. Other scribes did not understand certain
Northern forms and replaced them with words of a similar appearance, or
words which seemed to fit the general context. Study of Chaucer’s representation
of Northern dialect in the Reeve’s Tale suggests that Tolkien’s assumption
that inconsistencies were due to the ‘negligence and rape’ of Chaucer’s earliest
scribes is unlikely, especially given the general accuracy of the Hg manuscript,
and the widespread preservation of many of the Northern dialect features
across the manuscript tradition. It seems more likely that Chaucer was concerned
with imposing a flavour of the Northern dialect on the students’ speech
rather than achieving absolute philological accuracy or consistency.26 Chaucer’s
representation of dialect was no doubt further constrained by the nature of his
Southern, courtly audience, who would perhaps have had difficulties comprehending
the more extreme provincialisms of Northern speech.27
A further complicating factor in Chaucer’s representation and the scribal
preservation of Northern forms concerns the dynamic nature of the London
language during this period. During the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries
London English was being heavily influenced by Midland dialects following
waves of immigration into the capital.28 Therefore it may be that the
Tolkien assumed that scribes did not get Chaucer’s joke and thus translated
the Northern forms into Southern equivalents.30 The appearance of Northern
forms in later manuscripts was thus explained as the chance survival of authorial
spellings. However analysis of the treatment of Northernisms by the earliest
copyists shows that these scribes preserved many of these features, despite
the pressures of dialect translation and linguistic change. Indeed certain instances
show these scribes attempting to increase the dialectal flavour of the text
by adding extra Northern features or increasing the consistency. There are also
a large number of examples of scribes replacing Northern features for equivalent
Southern forms. These processes can tell us much about the status of certain
linguistic features during this period of dynamic language change, and the
ways in which scribes understood Chaucer’s use of dialect.

I wonder, if we examine the elvish languages in LotR, can we find evidence of scribal change/emendations or do the passages quoted reflect the 'correct' form of the languages which Tolkien created? That is, did he extend the scribal conceit to the elvish languages or just to the regular English narrative?

EDIT: Here are the footnotes which refer to the joke Tolkien was talking about:

2) ‘For the joke of this dialogue is (and was) primarily a linguistic joke, and is, indeed, now one
at which only a philologist can laugh sincerely’

and:

30 ‘Nonetheless, it has been held, and may still be, that this idea was variously improved or enlarged
upon by individual copyists … it is hardly credible that each of these scrivains (and
their predecessors) should at odd moments have had the fancy to improve his attempt’ (12).