I think it was a good choice just by how it flows. But he admittedly said it was a mistake on his part that he had to go with after the fact, and used other variations (dwarrow and elfin) in a few places. Tolkien was a master at creative retconning, using the excuse that he wasn’t creating all this, but acting as an investigator who was uncovering an existing mythology/history. And that’s why it worked so well.
I saw one comment before who even suggested that dwarf and elf had fallen out of use for a long time, and other similar constructed words had evolved over time and use from a “fs” to a “ves” because of the spoken version’s sound. So Tolkien was just getting dwarf and elf caught up with the rest of the words.
I think it was a good choice just by how it flows. But he admittedly said it was a mistake on his part that he had to go with after the fact, and used other variations (dwarrow and elfin) in a few places. Tolkien was a master at creative retconning, using the excuse that he wasn’t creating all this, but acting as an investigator who was uncovering an existing mythology/history. And that’s why it worked so well.
I saw one comment before who even suggested that dwarf and elf had fallen out of use for a long time, and other similar constructed words had evolved over time and use from a “fs” to a “ves” because of the spoken version’s sound. So Tolkien was just getting dwarf and elf caught up with the rest of the words.