Owen Barfield

Poetic Imagination and the Rediscovery of Meaning: a Symposium Inspired by Owen Barfield — Temenos Academy Mark Vernon, Jeffrey Hipolito, Hilary Davies, Sir Ben Okri

Book tickets here: www.temenosacademy.org/events-progr...

Poster showing a photograph of Owen Barfield, wearing a suit and tie and smoking a pipe. Text reads "Poetic Imagination & The Rediscovery of Meaning: A Symposium Celebrating Owen Barfield, the man who inspired C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and T.S. Eliot."

Upcoming Event, London, 9 November: join authors Mark Vernon and Jeffrey Hipolito together with poets Sir Ben Okri and Hilary Davies for a lively mix of talks, poetry readings and conversations exploring Barfield’s lasting influence, the nature of the imagination and man's eternal quest for meaning.

Chariots of Fire Barfield, Blake and the saving energy of words

How poetry can save us. William Blake and Owen Barfield on the chariots of fire. A new essay at my Substack, A Golden String.
open.substack.com/pub/markvern...

The Music That Shapes the Soul: Owen Barfield, Original Participation, and the Future of Education - The Owen Barfield Literary Estate I’m incredibly fortunate to be a piano teacher and music composition instructor to students of all ages a few days each week. I also perform, compose, create content for YouTube, and write music educa...

Paul Wilkinson, a musician and teacher, writes very nicely about the essential nature of music, about the meaning of the decline in musical education, and how these are reflected in Barfield's fairy-tale, The Silver Trumpet.

owenbarfield.org/the-music-th...

Book Review: The Silver Trumpet by Owen Barfield (Centenary Edition) The first fairytale published by a member of the Inklings, The Silver Trumpet remains entertaining and intelligent a century later.

A good, positive and informed review of The Silver Trumpet by Connor Salter, on the occasion of the publication of a new edition.

fellowdustmag.com/2025/06/12/b...

A woman in bustling clothes and wearing a green wreath on her head is sitting with a pile of papers, having difficulty in writing poetry, a hand resting on her forehead. To the left, there are closed books on the ground, and to her right is a young naked child with what looks like a closed book. Behind the woman is a cloudy sky.

“[Owen] Barfield believed that as we look back into the history of language, we see that it becomes more figurative, more metaphorical, more, in a sense, alive and poetic; our own age is, as the literary philosopher Erich Heller said, much more one of prose.”

~ Gary Lachman.

The Owen Barfield in Russian Club - The Owen Barfield Literary Estate The Owen Barfield in Russian Club is now ten years old. From the very beginning, we called it a club, although it could be called a “circle” or a “society”, or have no special designation at all, like...

Maria Shaskolskaia has written a blog of colour and interest about the Owen Barfield in Russian Club:

www.owenbarfield.org/the-owen-bar...

Reflections on a Passage from "Meaning, Revelation and Tradition in Language and Religion" - The Owen Barfield Literary Estate The following contains some thoughts inspired by a very striking passage in Barfield’s late essay “Meaning, Revelation and Tradition in Language and Religion.” In reflecting on the Incarnation, he con...

"The 'original metaphors' of the Incarnate Word [...] are the exemplary reality, from which all meaning derives, and in which it participates to differing degrees."

This insight and more from Jakob Ziguras' blog on the Owen Barfield website: www.owenbarfield.org/reflections-...

"Thus, without any particular exertion or theorising on my part I had had two things strongly impressed on me, firstly that the poetic or imaginative use of words enhances their meanings and secondly that those enhanced meanings may reveal hitherto unapprehended parts of reality." - Owen Barfield.

C.S. Lewis appeals to conservative evangelicals (when he never quotes scripture), romantic nationalists (when he said the old magic is dead), liberals (when he's a clearly a God-botherer). Why? His great friend, Owen Barfield, is suggestive. Full chat here www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLfl...

"Barfield’s understanding of language was one I had never encountered before": an interview with Spencer Klavan - The Owen Barfield Literary Estate Landon Loftin: Hello Spencer. Congratulations on your newest book: Light of the Mind, Light of the World. Can you say something about the book’s main thesis? Spencer Klavan: Thanks very much indeed, L...

New on the blog: “Barfield’s understanding of language was one I had never encountered before”: an interview with Spencer Klavan

www.owenbarfield.org/barfields-un...

Sounds fascinating, Will!

Lucy Barfield and Narnia - The Owen Barfield Literary Estate It is to be expected that writers will have a muse, and it seems that Lucy Barfield was that muse for C.S. Lewis. Lucy was an accomplished dancer, musician, composer, artist and poet. She had a specia...

Find out about Lucy Barfield, the inspiration for C.S. Lewis's Lucy Pevensie in the Chronicles of #Narnia, on our website: www.owenbarfield.org/research/luc...

Owen Barfield: Harbinger of the 21st Century - The Owen Barfield Literary Estate The following article was first printed in the 2005 edition of The Golden Blade, which was an annual anthroposophical publication which survived until 2009. It was written as the draft of a lecture ul...

Owen Barfield died on December 14, 1997. To mark the anniversary, we reprinted an article by Barfield's biographer, Simon Blaxland-de Lange.

"Owen Barfield, Harbinger of the 21st Century" www.owenbarfield.org/owen-barfiel...

#Barfield’s impact on #Tolkien is wide ranging, including how they conceived of romance and the Romantic. Barfield’s writings on the #Romantic movement, Rudolf #Steiner, and #Romanticism are more consonant with Tolkien than meets the eye.

Many use the writings of C.S. Lewis to help make sense of J.R.R. Tolkien's beliefs. But in many ways it is the anthroposophist Owen Barfield, whose movement the Catholic Church condemned as heresy, and his writings on myth which hold the key to grasping how Tolkien understood his sub-creation.

The Owen Barfield Literary Estate: The First and Last Inkling Owen Barfield: author, philosopher of the Evolution of Consciousness, and member of the Inklings alongside C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.

T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Howard Nemerov, and Saul Bellow are among those who have praised Barfield’s writing, and Barfield is often described as having a prophetic, powerful mind.

— Courtesy of Tiffany Brooke Martin, PhD

Find out more on our website, www.owenbarfield.org

Box containing 17 books by Owen Barfield, with different coloured spines.

Cover for Owen Barfield, The Riddle of the Sphinx: Essays on the Evolution of Consciousness

Thinkers and writers central to Barfield’s work include Johann Wolfgang von #Goethe, Samuel Taylor #Coleridge, and Rudolf #Steiner. Although best known for his non-fiction, such as Poetic Diction and Saving the Appearances, Barfield also wrote poetry, fiction, and plays. /3

Cover of Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning. Illustrated with abstract colours and lines.

Cover of History in English Words, with a Foreword by W.H. Auden

As a leading #anthroposophist in the English-speaking world, Barfield was especially interested in the evolution of human consciousness, exploring its development through the history of language. /2

Owen Barfield, April 1972 in Wheaton, IL, USA. A man with a pipe in his mouth, smart dark suit, grey hair slicked back, wrinkled face, and small round glasses. He is is pointing at something to the right of frame. In the background is a white wooden building.

Introduction 🧵Owen Barfield (1898–1997) was one of the twentieth century’s most insightful writers and philosophers. His ideas informed the thinking and writing of influential authors such as C. S. #Lewis and J. R. R. #Tolkien who were fellow members of the #Inklings, an Oxford group of thinkers. /1

New Barfield Press edition of The Silver Trumpet forthcoming in 2025 - The Owen Barfield Literary Estate The Barfield Press has been very glad to receive a goodly number of inquiries about when a new edition of Owen Barfield’s first book, The Silver Trumpet, a story written originally for children, will ...

Look out for an exciting new edition of The Silver Trumpet, coming next year!

www.owenbarfield.org/new-barfield...

Owen Barfield & C.S. Lewis - The Owen Barfield Literary Estate C.S. Lewis and Owen Barfield were lifelong friends and powerful influences on each other.

"Owen Barfield on CS Lewis" is an excellent book for any CS Lewis scholar. I also recommend "The Silver Trumpet," to be republished in a 100th anniversary edition next year: the first fairytale by an Inkling and a big inspiration for Lewis and Tolkien.

See also:
www.owenbarfield.org/research/csl...

Photo showing a steep tarmac footpath with five steps at the far end, leading to a row of houses and bungalows. To the left of the path is a wide rectangular white sign at the top of a metal pole, that reads in block capitals: "Caution: Footpath is not suitable wheelchair or mobility scooters. The photo is aptly titled "The Art of Stating the Blindingly Obvious".

“The obvious is the hardest thing of all to point out to anyone who has genuinely lost sight of it.”

~ Owen Barfield, Worlds Apart.

Image: The Art of Stating the Blindingly Obvious 1129253 [with added border] / David Lally / Wikimedia Commons (orig. Geograph) / CC BY-SA 2.0.