Though best known as a fantasy writer, J. R. R. Tolkien, a mild-mannered professor of ancient languages at Oxford, was a noted philologist who numbered among the world's greatest authorities on Old English. Nonetheless, shortly after The Hobbit was published in 1937, Tolkien was harshly criticized for his use of the word "dwarves" (rather than "dwarfs") -- a plural form which, despite its common usage, is technically incorrect and, it was often pointed out, does not appear in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), then (as now) the final authority on semantic matters. Fortunately, Tolkien had a ready reply for his critics: He himself had written the dictionary!
[Tolkien was indeed one of the dictionary's editors.]
