Unseen JRRT Hobbit Pic

[jallanite]

Originally Posted by Lalwendë

I think 'elfin' must be correct given the origins of the word 'elf' and other uses of it (it was aelf in old English and is the root of names such as Alfred).

The Old English word was normally spelled ælf or sometimes elf.

Etymological dictionaries claim that the form Elfin was invented by Edmund Spencer in his Fairie Queen, and from that point became a common adjectival form. Spelling was not nearly so fixed as now in Spencer’s day.

In older tales it is the word fairy that is generally used, not elf. And looking through such older tales as I find, even those that mention elves do not happen to use adjectival forms. My memory is that both elfin and elven were formerly in use by different authors. And Tolkien again and again makes a big deal that the form dwarves with a v is his own invention, but never claims to have invented the form elven.

So I take it that my memory is correct and that elven was a reasonably common form which Tolkien preferred to elfin. But dictionaries then used by proof-readers listed elfin as the preferred form to use, whence Tolkien’s difficulties.

Even now elven is still in common use but dwarves and dwarvan is mostly limited to references to Tolkien’s work, except in translations from the Norse by the poet W. H. Auden who used dwarves because of his respect for Tolkien’s work.