The Owen Barfield Literary Estate Blog

Owen Barfield’s Reception of The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis

Owen Barfield, whom C. S. Lewis described archetypally as his “Second Friend” – “the man who disagrees with you about everything […] not so much the alter ego as the antiself” – on a number of occasions expressed his agreement with the argument of The Abolition of Man, and his admiration of the book. For example, describing various means by which one can become aware of the presuppositions of one’s thoughts, Barfield once wrote:

One, of which the best example I know is C.


Continue Reading

The Owen Barfield in Russian Club

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 the Inklings, who are sometimes named an “informal literary group”, though none of them ever thought of it in these terms while it was active. However, our group, brought together by an interest in the works of one single author, Owen Barfield, became a club.


Continue Reading

Reflections on a Passage from “Meaning, Revelation and Tradition in Language and Religion”

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 considers what it would mean for a divine-human person to speak. He suggests that—while an ordinary human child, in beginning to speak, is bound by the limitations of human memory (and, it is implied, by a language into which they are born, with its sedimented history of meaning)—Christ was either not limited in this way, or the limitation was “voluntarily accepted.”


Continue Reading

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

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, Landon. Light of the Mind, Light of the World is a new history of science from a religious perspective. My hope is to change not so much what specialists know about science, but how the average person thinks about science. I think we’ve gotten this badly wrong: most people walk around with an operating theory that the world works like a Lego set.


Continue Reading

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

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.


Continue Reading

Owen Barfield: Harbinger of the 21st Century

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.


Continue Reading

New Barfield Press edition of The Silver Trumpet forthcoming in 2025

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!


Continue Reading

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

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.


Continue Reading

Owen Barfield’s Imagination of Ireland

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.


Continue Reading

A Word About The Riddle of the Sphinx

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.


Continue Reading