So how do you pronounce 'dweomer'?

[Ferret]

Double post. sorry

 

[tarchon]

Tolkien often used the alternate dwimmer, but Tolkien was notorious for "inventing" words. Not that he actually invented them, but he took words from Old English (specifically from the Mercian dialect, actually, which lacks a lot of the dipthongs of textbook Old English) and applied linguistic triangulation to project what they would look like in modern English if they hadn't gone out of general circulation.

He had good reason to use dwimmer. Layamon's Brut (or La3amon's, depending on what you want to do with the yogh) has the single solitary instance of long-e appearing in the root. All the other ones appear to use a short vowel. Brut is a pretty late manuscript, right on the cusp between Middle and Old English, one of the last to ever use the word, so I suspect Tolkien concluded that the short vowel was more likely to be correct. I tend to agree with him.