Pull out your closest volume of Lord of the Rings and take a look. My copy at least has single-quotes for the speech text and double-quotes are used for nested speech. I guess it might be up to the publisher (eg: my copy of Harry Potter has been “Americanized” and thus uses double-quotes for the first level of speech text), but every copy of LotR i’ve run across uses single-quotes.
I shared the actual PDF with my mother and father, and they told me it was “liberal propaganda”. Funny thing is, they aren’t uneducated or stupid. They’ve just had Fox News and conservative talk-radio playing in the background of their lives for 20+ years. It’s actually really sad. They used to be Hank Hill type conservatives, now they refuse to even entertain opinions (or facts, for that matter) that they don’t already believe.