“fast becoming unbearable”: Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 1, 455.
“Haven’t heard from my esteemed parent”: Ibid., 454.
“On 6 August he deceived me”: “Lewis Family Papers” VI: 167, quoted in Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 1, 462. There followed a series of letters in which Lewis attempted to justify himself and to make peace.
“the blackest chapter of my life”: Quoted in A. N. Wilson, C. S. Lewis, 68, from Bodleian Library Ms. Fas.d.264, f.140.
“a strange fellow … right up our tree”: Leo Baker, “Near the Beginning,” in Como, C. S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table, 3.
“where everyone … I like and admire him”: Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 1, 495.
“amateur disciple in mysticism … presently I could hardly see anything else”: Ibid., 472–73.
“in every way the best person”: Ibid., 488.
“counterblast”: Ibid., 492. The Vorticist movement takes its name from the short-lived journal Blast: The Review of the Great English Vortex (only two issues appeared, in 1914 and 1915), founded by Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound as a showcase and manifesto for modernist poetry and art.
“I was interested in contemporary events … You take too many things for granted”: Baker, “Near the Beginning,” 4.
“some sort of God”: Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 1, 509.
“Were you much frightened in France?”: Baker, “Near the Beginning,” 6.
“with deep and uncontrollable hatred”: Ibid., 4.
“to try and pick up some of the old links”: Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 2, 161.
“we are all young once”: Walter Hooper, preface to Lewis, Spirits in Bondage, xi.
“our b____y lyrical poet”: Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 1, 400.
“I was at this time living”: Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 115.
“matter’s great enemy”: Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 1, 374.
“driven and hurt beyond bearing … Country of Dreams!”: C. S. Lewis, “Death in Battle,” Spirits in Bondage, 74–75.
“considered opinion of his own youth”: Warnie quoted in Walter Hooper, preface to Spirits in Bondage, xxvii.
“Beyond the western ocean’s glow”: Lewis, “Ballade Mystique,” Spirits in Bondage, 54.
“I am the flower … I am the spider”: Lewis, “Satan Speaks,” Spirits in Bondage, 3.
“Come let us curse our Master”: Lewis, “De Profundis,” Spirits in Bondage, 20. Compare Housman: “We for a certainty are not the first / Have sat in taverns while the tempest hurled / Their hopeful plans to emptiness, and cursed / Whatever brute and blackguard made the world.” A. E. Housman, “The chestnut casts his flambeaux,” in Last Poems (1922).
“the curse against God”: G. K. Chesterton, “The Defendant,” The Defendant (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1902), 2.
“But lo!, I am grown wiser”: Lewis, “Ode for New Year’s Day,” Spirits in Bondage, 14.
“Thank God that there are solid folk”: Lewis, “In Praise of Solid People,” Spirits in Bondage, 42.
“Can it be true”: Lewis, “The Ass,” Spirits in Bondage, 51–52.
“emotional glooming … the thought, when closed with”: quoted in Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Complete Guide, 144.
“purely academic … he is young”: letters between Warnie and Albert in “Lewis Family Papers” VI: 98, quoted by Walter Hooper in Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 1, 443, note 44.
“I have been moved”: Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 1, 569.
“I am glad to have met Mrs. M”: W. H. Lewis, Brothers and Friends, 10, 12–13.
“notably domineering”: Warren Lewis, “Memoir of C. S. Lewis,” 33.
“he is as good as an extra maid”: Ibid., 37.
“the Second Friend … has read all the right books”: Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 199–200.
5. “WORDS HAVE A SOUL”
“The good are befriended”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Compensation.”
“every word was once a poem”: Emerson, “The Poet.” Barfield’s library included several books annotated by him, including an edition of Emerson’s essays; for details, see the Marion E. Wade Center website: www.wheaton.edu/~/media/Files/Centers-and-Institutes/Wade-Center/RR-Docs/Non-archive%20Listings/Barfield_Library.pdf (accessed July 13, 2014).
“I remember that awfully well”: Simon Blaxland–de Lange, Owen Barfield: Romanticism Come of Age, A Biography (Forest Row, UK: Temple Lodge, 2006), 12.
“always surrounded with music”: Shirley Sugerman, “A Conversation with Owen Barfield,” Evolution of Consciousness: Studies in Polarity (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1976), 4.
“I chalked on the wall”: Blaxland–de Lange, Owen Barfield, 12.
“Cato, octoginta annos natus … the actual moment”: Ibid., 28.
“a great shadow … couldn’t say anything”: Ibid., 13.
“Sleep has a brother”: Ibid., 13.
“I was rather well developed”: Ibid., 22.
“Poetry … had the power to change one’s consciousness”: Barfield, “Owen Barfield and the Origin of Language,” Towards 1, no. 1 (June 1978): 3. Towards was founded by the Waldorf educator Clifford Monks in 1977 as “a magazine for all who are striving for clarity and direction in meeting today’s challenges. It exists to explore and make better known the work of Owen Barfield, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Wolfgang von Goethe, Rudolf Steiner, and related authors. Implicit and explicit in their work are achievements and goals which offer profound insight, guidance, and hope for all who are struggling with the essential challenges of modern life.”
“the sort of thing my mind was full of”: Blaxland–de Lange, Owen Barfield, 24.
“a vivid experience … It was very strong”: Ibid., 22.
“It was a kind of new world … delightful”: Ibid., 23.
“the idea of love … being caged in the materialism of the age”: Ibid., 20.
“I have been seeing practically no-one”: Ibid., 299.
“pondering the problem of existence … acute depression”: Ibid., 301.
“Sophia experience … suddenly one evening”: Ibid., 20.
“would be able to find all the beauty”: Ibid., 20.
“led into the whole shape and development”: Ibid., 21.
“Hey-diddle-diddle … the poet’s material”: Owen Barfield, “Form in Poetry,” New Statesman (August 7, 1920), 501–502.
“words have a soul … grows subtler and subtler”: Owen Barfield, “‘Ruin,’” The London Mercury 7 (December 1922): 164–70.
“Steiner had obviously forgotten volumes more”: Owen Barfield, introduction to Romanticism Comes of Age (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1967), 13.
“stature … we observe, actually beginning to occur, the transition”: Owen Barfield, “Introducing Rudolf Steiner,” Towards 2, no. 4 (Fall–Winter 1983): 42–44.
“The essence of Steiner’s teachings”: Astrid Diener, The Role of Imagination in Culture and Society: Owen Barfield’s Early Work, Appendix: “An Interview with Owen Barfield” (Glienicke, Berlin: Galda + Wilch Verlag, Leipzig Explorations in Literature and Culture 6, 2002), 186–87.
“il maestro”: Owen Barfield, Romanticism Comes of Age, 1st ed. (London: Anthroposophical Publishing, 1944), 11.
“We went at our talk like a dogfight”: Lewis diary entry January 26, 1923, in W. H. Lewis, Letters of C. S. Lewis, 179.
“a reputation among my own friends of being argumentative … Most people—here, especially, Lewis was different—are apt to flinch at the verbal aggression”: Owen Barfield, Owen Barfield on C. S. Lewis, ed. G. B. Tennyson (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1989), 127.
“a summoned voice”: Cecil Harwood, The Voice of Cecil Harwood: A Miscellany, ed. Owen Barfield (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1979), 8.
“We got into conversation on fancy and imagination”: Lewis, All My Road Before Me, 59–60. Lewis and Barfield called wish-fulfilling fantasies “Christina Dreams” after Christina Pontifex in Samuel Butler
’s The Way of All Flesh.
“felt change of consciousness”: Blaxland–de Lange, Owen Barfield, 260.
“in which with prodigality [Barfield] squirts out the most suggestive ideas”: Lewis, All My Road Before Me, 275.
“one of the best new fairy stories”: “Stories for Little Children,” The Times Literary Supplement 1245 (November 26, 1925): 811.
“I lent the Silver Trumpet to Tolkien”: Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 2, 198. See Blaxland–de Lange, Owen Barfield, 171–72.
“Steiner seems to be a sort of panpsychist”: Quoted by Walter Hooper in “The ‘Great War’ Letters,” appendix to C. S. Lewis, The Collected Letters, vol. 3: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy, 1950–1963, ed. Walter Hooper (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 1596.
“I was hideously shocked”: Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 206.
“an almost incessant disputation … the ‘Great War’”: Ibid., 207. For an in-depth study, see Lionel Adey, C. S. Lewis’ ‘Great War’ with Owen Barfield (Wigton, UK: Ink Books, 2002).
“we used to foregather”: Nevill Coghill, “The Approach to English,” in Light on C. S. Lewis, ed. Jocelyn Gibb (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1965), 54–55.
Clivi Hamiltonis Summae Metaphysices … Commentarium in Tractatum De Toto et Parte: From the unpublished “Great War” material in the manuscript collections of the Marion E. Wade Center. C. S. Lewis, MS Clivi Hamiltonis Summae Metaphysices Contra Anthroposophos Libri II [November 1928–1929], the Marion E. Wade Center CSL / MS-29 / X. C. S. Lewis, MS [“De Bono et Malo”] [1930], the Marion E. Wade Center CSL / MS-34 / X. C. S. Lewis, “Commentarium in Tractatum De Toto et Parte” [1931], the Marion E. Wade Center CSL / MS-30. Owen Barfield, MS “Replicit Anthroposophus Barfieldus” and “Autem” [1929], the Marion E. Wade Center, OB / MS-101 / X. Owen Barfield, MS De Toto et Parte (rough draft) [1930], the Marion E. Wade Center, OB / MS-7; MS De Toto et Parte [1930], the Marion E. Wade Center, OB / MS-8 / X.
“We must be content to feel the highest truths ‘in our bones’”: A. C. Harwood, “About Anthroposophy,” in Como, C. S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table, 26; letter dated October 28, 1926.
three sketches: Reproduced in “The ‘Great War’ Letters,” appendix to Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 3: 1601–1603.
“words may be made to disgorge the past”: Owen Barfield, History in English Words (London: Methuen, 1926; rev. ed., London: Faber & Faber, 1962), 13.
“Sir John Cheke”: Ibid., 62.
“for the Romans themselves”: Ibid., 90.
“The scientists who discovered”: Ibid., 13.
“No one who understands”: Ibid., 135.
“new element”: Ibid., 125.
“Perhaps … it can best be expressed”: Ibid., 127–28.
“when our earliest ancestors”: Ibid., 85.
“there came”: Ibid., 140.
“self-consciousness”: Ibid., 165.
“a change”: Barfield, Owen Barfield on C. S. Lewis, 109–10.
when the human being achieved self-awareness: Jacob Burckhardt, Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien: Ein Versuch (1860; Vienna: E. A. Seemann, 1885), 143.
“perfect clearness”: Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 3, 1498.
“learned, imaginative, moving”: Cyril Connolly, “Telling Words,” The Sunday Times (January 24, 1954): 5.
“not merely a theory of poetic diction”: Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), preface to 2nd ed., 14.
“They decided it wasn’t … whether Coleridge had”: Blaxland–de Lange, Owen Barfield, 28.
“in the infancy of society”: Barfield, Poetic Diction, 58.
“meant neither breath, nor wind”: Ibid., 81.
“a re-creating, registering as thought”: Ibid., 103.
“felt change”: Ibid., 48.
“in addition to the moment or moments of aesthetic pleasure … Now my normal everyday experience”: Ibid., 55.
“had a permanent effect”: Alan Bede Griffiths, O.S.B., “The Adventure of Faith,” in Como, C. S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table, 13.
“Your conception of the ancient semantic unity”: Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 3, 1509.
For Barfield’s influence on Tolkien, see Verlyn Flieger, Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien’s World (Kent, Ohio, and London: The Kent State University Press, 2002) and A Question of Time: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Road to Faërie (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1997).
“there are no words left to describe his staggerment”: J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), chapter 12, “Inside Information,” 194.
“marvelously absurd … obviously unable to make anything”: Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 1, 761.
“careful and sensitive … minor poet”: Edmund Blunden, “Mechanisms of Poetry,” The Times Literary Supplement 1372 (May 17, 1928): 375.
“I see no other way of studying the history of thought”: Arthur Waley, The Way and Its Power: A Study of the Tao tê ching and Its Place in Chinese Thought (London: Allen & Unwin, 1934), 29–30.
“among the few poets and teachers of my acquaintance”: Howard Nemerov, foreword to Barfield, Poetic Diction, 1.
Lewis places the land of Anthroposophia next to that of Occultia: A. C. Harwood, “About Anthroposophy,” in Como, C. S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table, 25.
“a reassuring German dullness”: Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 207.
“think responsibly and logically”: Blaxland–de Lange, Owen Barfield, 29.
6. A MYTHOLOGY FOR ENGLAND
“He is improving but requires hardening”: Quoted from the archives of the Public Record Office by Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond, The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Chronology (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 96.
“small woodland glade … In those days”: Tolkien, Letters, 420.
“if you do come out in print”: Tolkien Papers, Bodleian Library, quoted in Scull and Hammond, J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Chronology, 96.
“become indeed the poet of my race”: James Joyce, letter of September 5, 1909, to Nora Barnacle, in Selected Letters of James Joyce, ed. Richard Ellman (London: Faber & Faber, 1975; reprint ed., 1992), 169. A good test of one’s artistic inclinations is to ask oneself whether Joyce or Tolkien better achieved this ambition.
“I was from early days grieved”: Tolkien, Letters, 144.
“polysyllabic barbarities”: Gerald Seaman, “France and French Culture,” in Drout, J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, 219, quoting Carpenter, Tolkien, 40.
“too lavish … the known form of the primary ‘real’ world”: Tolkien, Letters, 144. Nonetheless, in the 1930s Tolkien attempted an Arthurian verse, only to abandon it soon after. The fragment appeared in J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fall of Arthur, ed. Christopher Tolkien (London: HarperCollins, 2013).
“a new world … revel in an amazing”: Scull and Hammond, J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Reader’s Guide, 440.
“I am driven by my longing”: Kalevala: The Land of Heroes, translated from the original Finnish by W. F. Kirby, vol. 1 (London: J. M. Dent, 1907), 1.
“cool and clear … fair elusive beauty”: Tolkien, Letters, 144.
“as ‘given things’”: Carpenter, Tolkien, 92.
“Nu we sculon herigean” (“Now must we praise”): Caedmon’s Hymn, the West Saxon version appended to Bede’s Latin version in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People.
“objectively real world”: Tolkien, Letters, 239.
“High School Exercise … One who dreams alone”: Tolkien, “The Cottage of Lost Play,” The Book of Lost Tales, part 1 (The History of Middle-earth, vol. 1), ed. Christopher Tolkien (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984), 13–14.
“broad and woody plain”: Tolkien, “Cottage of Lost Play,” 13.
“The Music of the Ainur … mighty melodies”: Tolkien, “The Music of the Ainur,” The Book of Lost Tales, part 1, 53.
The net effect:
For Tolkien’s defense of his archaisms, see the draft letter of September 1955 to his longtime fan and correspondent Hugh Brogan, Letters, 225–26.
“facts seemed to run round”: From the obituary by sometime Inkling C. L. Wrenn, “Sir W. Craigie: Stimulus to Study of Germanic Languages,” The Times (September 9, 1957): 10.
words from “waggle” to “waggly”: It’s not difficult here to see glimmerings of later Tolkien inventions; his hobbits, for instance, wear waistcoats, use wains, live among wolds, venture into wilds (at least Bilbo and his relatives do); while it may be that any random list of English words will apply to hobbits, it is also true that throughout his life Tolkien obsessively recycled his work.
“learned more … than in any other”: Scull and Hammond, J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Reader’s Guide, 726.
“not only to read texts”: Tolkien, Letters, 406.
“natural niggler … I compose only with great difficulty”: Ibid., 257, 313, 113.
“the ordinary machinery of expression … exceptionally full treatment”: J.R.R. Tolkien, “Note,” A Middle English Vocabulary Designed for Use with SISAM’S Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1922), 2.
“a mole-hill glossary … accumulated domestic distractions”: Letter to John Johnson, University Printer, quoted in Scull and Hammond, J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Reader’s Guide, 588.
“curses on my head”: Tolkien, Letters, 11.
“a piece of work … exhaustive textual references”: Margaret L. Lee, “Middle English,” in The Year’s Work in English Studies, vol. 2, 1920–1921, edited for the English Association by Sir Sidney Lee and F. S. Boas (London: Oxford University Press, 1922), 42–43.
“terrible to recall”: Tolkien, Letters, 11.
“complete cycle of events in an Elfinesse … very graphically and astonishingly told”: Scull and Hammond, J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Chronology, 110.
“what Gondolin was”: John Garth, “Tolkien, Exeter College and the Great War,” in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings: Sources of Inspiration, ed. Stratford Caldecott and Thomas Honegger (Zurich and Jena: Walking Tree Publishers, 2008), 53.
“Mrs. Tolkien … North Pole”: J.R.R. Tolkien, Letters from Father Christmas, ed. Baillie Tolkien, rev. ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 6.
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