“In English, the only correct plural of ‘dwarf’ is ‘dwarfs’ and the adjective is ‘dwarfish.’ In this story ‘dwarves’ and ‘dwarvish’ are used, but only when speaking of the ancient people to whom Thorin Oakenshield and his companions belonged.”
— J. R. R. Tolkien, foreword to The Hobbit
“And why dwarves? Grammar prescribes dwarfs; philology suggests that dwarrows would be the historical form. The real answer is that I knew no better. But dwarves goes well with elves; and, in any case, elf, gnome, goblin, dwarf are only approximate translations of the Old Elvish names for beings of not quite the same kinds and functions.”
— J. R. R. Tolkien, to the editor of the ’Observer’, 1938
“[T]he printing is very good, as it ought to be from an almost faultless copy; except that the impertinent compositors have taken it upon themselves to correct, as they suppose, my spelling and grammar: altering throughout dwarves to dwarfs; elvish to elfish; further to farther; and worst of all, elven – to elfin. I let off my irritation in a snorter to A. and U. [George Allen and Unwin, Tolkien’s publishers in London] which produced a grovel.”
— J. R. R. Tolkien, from a letter to Christopher Tolkien, 1953
Oof.
D&D used the spelling “dwarves” from the start (along with other Tolkien ideas, such as hobbits, only later renamed to halflings for obvious reasons). Before the start, even. In 1972 Gygax published Chainmail, which was a wargame and not an RPG, but it included a fantasy supplement and it had stats for dwarves and hobbits. From 1974 on, all D&D publications (AFAIK) spell it “dwarves”.
It is debatable how much impact that had, and it’s tempting to guess “none at all”, given the HUGE overlap of “D&D players” and “people who’ve read Tolkien anyway”, and how recently D&D became mainstream enough to make a dent anywhere. But I think that would be ignoring D&D’s indirect impact via other media (official or otherwise), from Forgotten Realms novels to video games to webcomics to Critical Role, which reached a reasonably large audience NOT exclusively comprised of Tolkien readers. Anecdotally (but I think not weirdly for non-anglophone countries), I played D&D before I read Tolkien, and in fact that’s why I read Tolkien, thanks to D&D osmosis – and for a long time I totally thought that “dwarves” was the only spelling lol.
The graph is from google’s Ngram Viewer, it only takes printed sources into account, so no internet-only material. Here’s an updated version with 2 corpora, English fiction (there are more dwarves than dwarfs here, hah!) and English in general, plus a few extra dates.
[originally posted on tumblr]
Roguish 