Quote:
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).
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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.