眼 / もって / 言いなすった

Hi,

1. するとミニチュアは欠伸をし、体を丸めて眼を閉じた。

眼 has furigana め.

Why is 眼 used instead of 目?

2. I know I have asked before about そんでもって = それでもって and established that it is an emphasised form of それで, but I can't remember now what the もって part is (e.g. is it 以って, 持って, も (particle) + って (quoting), or whatever).

1)
眼 and 目 are the same and interchangeable when used as "eye". Thus, that's the writer's preference, as is often the case.

2)
The first one.

If there is no difference in meaning or nuance, doesn't it seem odd for a writer to write 目 mostly, and then in one place for no reason write 眼? I think when I asked a similar question about "spelling" difference once before the answer was "no", but I still find this hard to adjust to. In English, even though there may be variant spellings for a word, it would be expected that an author would be internally consistent, at least within one work.

Do you have examples of 目 and 眼?

Funnily enough, there is an example of 目 in the question I have just posted at いられない | Japan Forum

Unfortunately I don't have the book in electronically searchable form, so it is hard for me to quickly find other examples of 目 or 眼. However, I think 90% of the time that eyes are mentioned the character used is 目, and then an occasional 眼 will pop up.

Also, I wanted to ask you ... in the case of, say, 気持ち／気持, or 振り返る／振返る, or any of numerous other variants where kana is included or omitted, would you agree that these are analogous to spelling variations in English? But does 目(め) versus 眼(め) seem like a "spelling" variation to you, or does it seem more like a different word that means the same thing?

Unlike ドラゴン vs 龍/竜 in a previous post, all those examples you mentioned seem to be variations in writing of the same word to me. 眼 and 目 can be different in meanings/usages (e.g. in set phrases), but I don't see any difference between your two examples.