[FredZarguna]

One minor Irony....In “Hobbit” Tolkien misspelled “Dwarfs” as “Dwarves”

Not ironic. Deliberate.

This is alluded to in the introduction to The Hobbit and fully explained in the Appendix to The Return of the King: Tolkien despised the Disneyesque rendition of dwarfs as much as he hated Shakespeare's interpretation of fairies. He took a number of small rebellious linguistic steps to separate his characters from the silly notions then in fashion.

[stripes1776]

Not ironic. Deliberate. This is alluded to in the introduction to The Hobbit and fully explained in the Appendix to The Return of the King: Tolkien despised the Disneyesque rendition of dwarfs as much as he hated Shakespeare's interpretation of fairies. He took a number of small rebellious linguistic steps to separate his characters from the silly notions then in fashion.

Yes, I agree that the spelling was deliberate. If he took small steps in spelling, he made a gigantic leap in the imagination. I think I read some place that the copy editor at his publisher was always correcting his spelling, which irritated him immensely.