The Owen Barfield Literary Estate Blog

Dancing with Owen Barfield: a visit to Orchard View recalled after forty years

January 5, 2025

In 1978 while in a bookstore looking through a table of books on sale for 99 cents each, I saw R.J. Reilly’s Romantic Religion. Being a 19 year old and madly in love, how could I not pick it up and take a look? I noticed that the book was about C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, J.R.R. Tolkien—all of whom I had heard of—and a writer unknown to me named Owen Barfield. My friend David Werther, an admirer of and writer about C.S.

Owen Barfield: Harbinger of the 21st Century

December 14, 2024

The following article was first printed in the 2005 edition of The Golden Blade, an annual anthroposophical publication which survived until 2009. It was written as the draft of a lecture ultimately given in the English Auditorium at the Goetheanum on Thursday 7th August 2003. As Simon Blaxland de-Lange wrote in a footnote to its appearance in The Golden Blade, “the actual lecture took into account what had been expressed during the preceding days of the second ‘English Week’ conference, and was strongly based on Barfield’s remarkable text of the modern mysteries, Unancestral Voice, from which several quotations were taken.

New Barfield Press edition of The Silver Trumpet forthcoming in 2025

November 7, 2024

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 be published.

This is still more the case since we had been hopeful of publishing it in the earlier part of this year, 2024, and announced as much.

But to all those who have inquired, and to sundry others, we can say that the Barfield Press will publish The Silver Trumpet in 2025!

On Attending the “Plotinus and Barfield” Conference at the University of Cambridge

September 24, 2024

In September 2023 I attended the first conference on Owen Barfield held at Cambridge University. That weekend, Cambridge basked in the golden embrace of a radiant sun, the city awash in warmth and light. This year’s conference, titled Plotinus and Barfield: Emanation and Evolution, took place on 14th September, and the atmosphere in Cambridge was no different. As I wandered through the narrow streets toward the Divinity Faculty, I crossed over quaint bridges, where punting boats lay moored, poised for a busy day of guiding tourists along the river, offering them glimpses of the city’s breathtaking architecture.

Owen Barfield’s Imagination of Ireland

January 23, 2024

As a long-time reader of Owen Barfield and as an Irishman, I have naturally wondered about Barfield’s relationship to Ireland. Did he visit? When? And since the imagination was so central to his conception of life, what was his imagination of Ireland?

It has to be admitted that, at the time I write this blog, there is not yet all that much to go by in answering these questions. What there is, though, is tantalising.

A Word About The Riddle of the Sphinx

December 29, 2023

A new collection of essays by Owen Barfield, The Riddle of the Sphinx, was published by the Barfield Press in November 2023. The book’s name comes from one of the essay titles.

But “the riddle” in this case does not refer to the famous one that Oedipus solved — “What has four legs at dawn, two at noon, and three in the evening?” The answer to that one was, “man”. Or today we might say, “the human being”. Oedipus realized that he crawls as a toddler, stands upright as an adult, and may be supported by a stick in old age.

Cracking the Coded Message in Owen Barfield’s Copy of The Allegory of Love

September 3, 2022

Among the invaluable Inklings books and memorabilia shown to me by Walter Hooper during my visit to his flat on July 22, 2015 was a first edition copy of The Allegory of Love (1936), C.S. Lewis’s own presentation copy to Owen Barfield, later given to Walter by Owen. What made it so interesting was not just its provenance, but more so its inscription on the dedication page encoded in a runic cipher.

Accidental Philosopher: How Owen Barfield Derailed My Life

May 12, 2022

Sharing my correspondence with Owen Barfield is a gift that I’m honored to bestow. Beginning in 1988 – when he was 90 years old – we traded letters until 1995, two years before he passed. He sent copies of essays and talks of his, and commented on poems and essays I sent to him. He recommended books to read. I told him of authors I’d found. All told, I have sixteen letters from him.

Sharing my correspondence is also humbling. It does involve two people, after all, and only makes full sense when both people are taken into account.

A Sonnet for Barfield

November 8, 2021

‘…the poetic… that bodiless ocean of life out of which all works of art spring.’
Owen Barfield

We participate in one and the same
Consciousness, feeling its sudden changes.
Hark! Our keel scraping against pebbles,
The impending bed pronounces your name
In metallic whispers.

Owen Barfield and the Evolution of Consciousness

September 8, 2021

The inestimable Owen Barfield differentiates three epochs in the evolution of consciousness. The first he refers to as “original participation.” The anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl meant to indicate a similar condition under the rubric participation mystique. Other thinkers refer to the same as “tribal” or “primal” consciousness. Original participation denotes a condition of consciousness in which the self has not yet precipitated out of the semantic solution of the world. For this reason, neither “spirit” nor “matter” exists as a concept because each of their meanings depends on just the phenomenological antithesis with its counterpart that is not a characteristic of the mind immersed in the state of original participation.