J.R.R. Tolkien Invented the Pluralization "Dwarves"

Tolkien, in addition to establishing the genre of modern fantasy (I've just had a lengthy discussion with my English major wife about the legitimacy of this attribution), also created the word "dwarves" as a plural form of "dwarf". Tolkien explains why in one appendix to LOTR:

It may be observed that in this book as in The Hobbit the form dwarves is used, although the dictionaries tell us that the plural of dwarf is dwarfs. It should be dwarrows (or dwerrows), if singular and plural had each gone its own way down the years, as have man and men, or goose and geese. But we no longer speak of a dwarf as often as we do of a man, or even of a goose, and memories have not been fresh enough among Men to keep hold of a special plural for a race now abandoned to folk-tales, where at least a shadow of truth is preserved, or at last to nonsense-stories in which they have become mere figures of fun. But in the Third Age something of their old character and power is still glimpsed, if already a little dimmed: these are the descendants of the Naugrim of the Elder Days, in whose hearts still burns the ancient fire of Aule the Smith, and the embers smoulder of their long grudge against the Elves; in in whose hands still lives the skill in works of stone that none have surpassed.


Link via Ace of Spades HQ | Photo: Baylor University

Previously: J.R.R. Tolkien Reads and Sings Lord of the Rings

Comments (7)

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Agricola, while I'm sure the fantasy genre wouldn't be the same without Tolkien, I don't know if it would be necessarily diminished, at least not greatly: for all we know, someone like Poul Anderson would've taken his place, and "The Broken Sword" would be "the" fantasy epic. I agree that the post-LotR fantasy genre is heavily influenced by Tolkien, but I reject the idea that without Tolkien there would *be* no fantasy genre.
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@Al Harron, he's not saying Tolkien invented fantasy, he's (rightly) saying that without Tolkien we wouldn't have the modern fantasy genre - or it would be greatly diminished. The release of the Lord of the Rings was a major literary event that influenced fantasy writing so much that without it our biggest fantasy series' and authors would not exist.
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"Tolkien, in addition to establishing the genre of modern fantasy (I’ve just had a lengthy discussion with my English major wife about the legitimacy of this attribution)"

Would you mind elaborating on how you came to this conclusion? If any one man could be considered the man to establish what we now know as fantasy, it would be Lord Dunsany (who inspired not just Tolkien, but pre-Tolkien fantasists like Howard, Smith, Merritt, Moore and Leiber).
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K. This gets us closer to understanding it how?

It seems he's answering the 'why' and not the 'what'.

"your hair frizzles in the heat and humidity, because there are more ways for your hair to be curled than to be straight"

Yes, pretty much any chaotic influence on an orderly system will induce chaos in that system. But chaos is somewhat of a copout - it's a catch-all for patterns or interactions too complex to model or predict, but that doesn't make chaotic systems fundamentally different from ordered ones since the only distinction is whether or not us humans can understand and make accurate predictions. A bullet fired in space and a bullet fired on the earth only differ in the degree to which the environment affects the predictability of the bullets trajectory. But they're still just bullets traversing a distance according to fixed laws.

"the force we call gravity is simply a byproduct of nature’s propensity to maximize disorder."

This makes almost no sense, since if nature wanted to maximize disorder, physics would be inconsistent. Stable gravity is a huge help in creating ordered systems - what if gravity flipped erratically? or if time wasn't sequential? it seems to me there's no end to the kinds of things nature could do to maximize disorder that it defiantly isn't doing.
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@Alex

Be that as it may, even the seemingly random orbits of electrons can't be truly random, they're just determined by influences that we have no way of measuring, because even though they appear chaotic, they're *consistently* chaotic, which implies that they aren't chaotic at all since as a phenomenon all electron orbits resemble each other. That implies there are rules at play.

A dice throw isn't really random or chaotic, it only appears to be - if one had enough information about the initial state of the throw one could determine the result before it happened. Because as humans we do not yet possess the means to extract that information we call it random or chaotic.

Even the whole issue of interference of a system caused by merely measuring it is dependent on the technology we use to measure things. We know no better way to measure the velocity of an atom than to bounce a photon off it, and maybe there IS no better way, but in either case it's an engineering problem, not an indication that randomness exists.
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@nutbastard - actually, that's completely wrong (this was the whole part of physics that caused Einstein to throw up his hands and say "God doesn't play dice with the universe"). Later on, Stephen Hawking said, "God not only plays dice. He sometimes throws them where they can't be seen."

By the way, electrons don't have orbits - they have wave functions (which is a fancy way of saying that you can only predict the probability of finding an electron at a given point in space away from the atom's nucleus).

Quantum physics is unreal. I don't know anyone who can say that they truly understand it (including myself).
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My hair does not frizzle in the heat and humidity...it hangs lank and lifeless, but that probably has more to do with my choice of shampoo than nature’s propensity to maximize disorder.
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worst explanation of a staggeringly divergent scientific theory ever

string theory really is pretty weak these days

at first it was at least beautiful and interesting

but with it's ever increasing accolades who now seem to find their baseless equations a reasonable grounds on which to try and degrade the most respected and established scientific theories in history

i might suggest that people move on to a more fruitful field of scientific inquiry
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