Barfield had ambitions as a writer, but when at the end of the 1920s he had a family to support and his father needed help in his law practice, he resentfully became a solicitor. This experience, which lasted some three decades, found expression in This Ever Diverse Pair (1950, originally as by ‘G.A.L. Burgeon’). During this period Barfield also produced Romanticism Comes of Age (1944), a collection of literary and philosophical essays first published in periodicals, and his own favourite among his books, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry (1957). Partial retirement in 1959, and full retirement in 1965, gave him greater freedom to write, and in the next twenty years he published many of his best works, including Worlds Apart (1963), Unancestral Voice (1965), What Coleridge Thought (1971), and History, Guilt and Habit (1979).
He also worked as an editor and translator, especially of the works of Rudolf Steiner. Most of Barfield’s writings were informed by his embrace of Anthroposophy and his study of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s thoughts on the Imagination.
In a brief note published in 1980 Barfield recalled that he was introduced to Tolkien ‘somewhere back in the ’twenties’ at dinner at the Eastgate Hotel in Oxford (*Oxford and environs) with their mutual friend *C.S. Lewis. ‘For some reason Tolkien was in a ridiculously combative mood’, for which Lewis afterwards privately apologized. But Barfield felt that the conversation was ‘entirely good-humoured and enjoyable; and [Tolkien’s] random belligerence had only made me laugh’ (‘Foreword’, VII 1 (March 1980), p. 9). In 1983 Barfield said in an interview that he had not known Tolkien very well, and had never had a conversation of any length alone with him; rather, they tended to meet in company with Lewis. Elsewhere Barfield recalled that he, Lewis, and Tolkien had ‘quite a few meetings … in Lewis’s room [at Magdalen College, Oxford] in the twenties’, even before the circle of friends who gathered around Lewis became known as the *Inklings (quoted in G.B. Tennyson, ‘Owen Barfield: First and Last Inklings’, The World and I (April 1990), p. 548).
He came, however, to attend Inklings meetings so rarely, as his home and work were in London rather than Oxford, that he ‘began to feel more like a visitor and less like a member. Moreover, since I had to leave early for London after a weekend with Lewis, I was excluded from all those auxiliary, and no doubt exhilarating, Tuesday morning luncheons at the Eagle and Child public house’ (quoted in Tennyson, p. 548). He estimated that he attended no more than ten per cent of Inklings gatherings, and regretted that he never heard Tolkien read from *The Lord of the Rings as it was being written – and yet Tolkien reported to his publisher that ‘the audience that has so far followed The Ring, chapter by chapter’ included ‘a solicitor’, by which he surely meant Barfield, among the Inklings (letter to Stanley Unwin, 31 July 1947, Letters, p. 122).
Barfield told an interviewer in September 1991 that he did not know Tolkien well. ‘I met him a number of times at meetings of the Inklings – I didn’t go always – and also with Lewis. Once we had a short walking tour, Lewis, Tolkien, and I, just when the [Second World] war was threatening, but then we never talked as we [Barfield and the interviewer] are talking now. And I never became an enthusiast for The Lord of the Rings.’ In response to the interviewer’s comment that he himself ‘got stuck on page 337’ of The Lord of the Rings, Barfield did not think that he ‘got quite as far as that’, but he ‘got *The Hobbit, read it to my son’ (p. 30). See further, Elmar Schenkel, ‘Interview mit Owen Barfield’, Inklings Jahrbuch für Literatur und Ästhetik 11 (1993), pp. 23–38. In Simon Blaxland-de Lange’s Owen Barfield: Romanticism Come of Age: A Biography (2006) Barfield is quoted as writing to novelist Saul Bellow: ‘I did get hold of [Bellow’s novel] Humboldt’s Gift and may as well confess that I couldn’t get up enough interest in enough of what was going on to be held by it. If it’s any comfort to you … I had very much the same experience with the Lord of the Rings’ (p. 54).
Tolkien once said that ‘the only philological remark (I think) in The Hobbit is on p. 221 (lines 6–7 from end) [of the first edition, 1937; in ch. 12]: an odd mythological way of referring to linguistic philosophy, and a point that will (happily) be missed by any who have not read Barfield (few have) …’ (letter to C.A. Furth, George Allen & Unwin, 31 August 1937, Letters, p. 22). The citation is to the sentence ‘There are no words left to express his [Bilbo’s] staggerment, since Men changed the language that they learned of elves in the days when all the world was wonderful’, and the reference is to Barfield’s Poetic Diction, whose arguments John D. Rateliff has summarized:
Imagination is as valid a tool as reason for the discovery of truth; the history of language is the history of human consciousness, showing a definite movement towards ever greater self-consciousness; many great poems and ancient texts cannot be properly understood unless we grasp that what looks to us like a word used in many different ways – some metaphorical, some literal – seemed to its author and original audience expressions of a single, unified meaning. For example, since we need different words for spirit, inspiration, and respiration, we miss the full meaning of the old word spiritus from which all three of these words and concepts descend. [‘Owen Barfield: A Short Reading List’, C.S. Lewis and Owen Barfield: A Souvenir Book for the Centenary Celebration Held … by the Mythopoeic Society (1998), p. 22]
Or, as Humphrey Carpenter has put it, ‘in the dawn of language, said Barfield, speakers did not make a distinction between the “literal” and the “metaphorical” but used words in what might be called a “mythological” manner’ (The Inklings, p. 41).
This idea ran counter to the theory propounded by the philologist Max Müller, who called mythology ‘a disease of language’. Tolkien in his essay *On Fairy-Stories turned Müller’s phrase on its head by stating that ‘languages … are a disease of mythology’ (*Tree and Leaf, p. 24). Not long after the publication of Poetic Diction, C.S. Lewis reported that Tolkien had told him that Barfield’s ‘conception of the ancient semantic unity had modified [Tolkien’s] whole outlook and that he was always just going to say something in a lecture when your [Barfield’s] conception stopped him in time. “It is one of those things,” he said, “that when you’ve once seen it there are all sorts of things you can never say again”’ (quoted in The Inklings, p. 42). Verlyn Flieger has written at length of Barfield’s influence on Tolkien in her book Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien’s World (1983; 2nd edn. 2002). Another treatment of this subject is ‘“The Language Learned of Elves”: Owen Barfield, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings’ by Stephen Medcalf, VII 16 (1999).
Convenient collections of Barfield’s short writings and of extracts from his books are A Barfield Sampler, ed. Jeanne Clayton Hunter and Thomas Kranidas (1993), and A Barfield Reader, ed. G.B. Tennyson (Hanover, New Hampshire: Wesleyan University Press/University Press of New England, 1999). Evolution of Consciousness: Studies in Polarity, ed. Shirley Sugerman (1976), is an important collection of works in appreciation of Barfield, with a bibliography by G.B. Tennyson.
A catalogue of the Barfield papers held in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (*Libraries and archives), compiled by Catherine Parker, is available at www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/dept/scwmss/wmss/online/modern/barfield/barfield.html. These include two sets of spoof exam questions for the ‘College of Cretaceous Perambulators’ with which Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were concerned, around April 1938. The name ‘Cretaceous Perambulators’ refers to Lewis, Barfield, and friends who were fond of long walks, Cretaceous presumably because their walks sometimes took them onto the chalk downs of southern England.
See further, David Lavery, the Owen Barfield world wide website davidlavery.net/barfield/, and the website of the Owen Barfield Society, barfieldsociety.org/. The latter includes Jane W. Hipolito, ‘Bibliography of the Pubished Writings of Owen Barfield, 1917–2015’.
A photograph of Owen Barfield is reproduced in