scribal error in the digital age

[Chrysophylax Dives]

I think that people who have not studied pre-modern history don't appreciate how much distortion is introduced to our vision by scribal errors that unintentionally mangle the meaning of a vital source document. And I wonder if our own day is generating a digital version of old-fahioned scribal error. I wanted to look up something in OFS and a google search gave me two online versions. Early in the essay, Tolkien quotes from the folk song of the Scottish Borders 'Thomas the Rhymer'. One online version gives the correct text:

And see ye not yon bonny road
That winds about yon fernie brae?
That is the road to fair Elfland,
Where thou and I this night maun gae.

This is the Queen of Elfland speaking to Thomas, whom she has just carried off so he will serve her for seven years in fair Elfland. Here is how this verse appears in the other online version of OFS:

And see ye not yon bonny road
That winds about yon fernie brae?
That is the road to fair Elfland,
Where thou and I this nightmare gave.

If I did not know the original it would not occur to me that the last line is an error and I would sing these words in my head and imagine meanings out of them and would never stop to think that the 'nightmare' was a 'digital scribal' interpolation.

To be honest, though, I've been studying this kind of history for three decades and have slowly but surely changed my perspective quite radically. Three decades ago I assumed that this kind of error was the exception. Today, my presumption is that in all communication the normal state of affairs is that A says 'Where thou and I this night maun gae' and B takes A to have said: 'Where thou and I this nightmare gave.' Actually, I think it is a rare occasion when two people have a real conversation, as in, mutually understand the words that the other is saying. Error is the norm.

[Aikári Salmarinian]

Chrys: I have no idea really about your examples above, but people who speak technically the same language, but distinct and different dialects of it, aye, likely they don't understand each other well and errors automatically occur. It has been always a common feat. You are aware of it, when people ask, what did you say? or interpret it different and seem to go further on different topic.