LONDON, Dec. 19--Owen Barfield, a writer and philosopher of language, and the last surviving member of the Inklings, a group of Oxford intellectuals who held passionate discussions about Christianity and mythology at C. S. Lewis’s house between the world wars, died at home in East Sussex, England on Sunday, friends said. He was 99.

Mr. Barfield, whose work was greatly admired by T. S. Eliot and J. R. R. Tolkien, among others, was credited with helping Lewis make his celebrated transition from atheism to Christianity and was known for his works on language and the evolution of human consciousness.

He was born in 1898, to a father who was a lawyer and a mother who was a feminist and suffragette. At Oxford he met Lewis, who became his closest friend and favorite intellectual sparring partner. "Barfield towers above us all!" Lewis wrote in his diary while both were undergraduates, and later called Mr. Barfield "the wisest and best of my unofficial teachers."

Mr. Barfield experienced an intellectual epiphany at Oxford while studying the Romantic poets and being struck by the transforming force of language. "What impressed me particularly was the power with which not so much whole poems as particular combinations of words worked on my mind," he wrote in 1966. "It seemed there was some magic in it; and a magic which not only gave me pleasure but also reacted on and expanded the meanings of the individual words concerned."

But while he published a large number of essays on a range of social and political themes, he became discouraged about his prospects as a writer after failing to find a publisher for his first novel. In the mid 1930’s, he joined his father’s law firm, Barfield & Barfield, and remained there until retiring from the law in 1959. He wrote most of his books after his retirement and spent a great deal of time in the United States.

But he remains best known for his close association with Lewis, recreationally as well as intellectually (the two men loved to hike and called themselves the "cretaceous perambulators"). Mr. Barfield once said that trying to keep up with Lewis’s quick wit and sharp mind was "like trying to run along beside a motorcar in top gear."

But Lewis--who dedicated his children’s book The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe to Mr. Barfield’s daughter Lucy--found his friend just as challenging. "He is as fascinating (and infuriating) as a woman," Lewis wrote of Mr. Barfield in his 1956 memoir Surprised by Joy. "When you set out to correct his heresies, you find he forsooth has decided to correct yours! And then you go at it, hammer and tongs, far into the night."

The many works of Mr. Barfield, who is survived by his daughter and two sons, included Poetic Diction: A Study of Meaning (1928), in which he explored the history of words and which had a profound influence on Tolkien, another of the Inklings, and Saving the Appearances (1957), in which he discussed the disparity between normal human consciousness and the mind of the scientist in comprehending familiar phenomena of the universe.

by Walter Hooper Owen Barfield was described by C. S. Lewis as “the wisest and best of my unofficial teachers.” He met Lewis, his exact contemporary, when he went up to Oxford in 1919. “Barfield towers above us all!” wrote Lewis in his diary. They were both 20, and out of their friendship one of the most remarkable literary and theological movements of the 20th century--”the Inklings”--was born. By the mid-1920s they had been joined by J. R. R. Tolkien. In time Hugo Dyson, W. H. Lewis, Charles Williams and others followed.

Barfield was born in London in 1898. His father was a solicitor, his mother an ardent suffragette. He was educated at Highgate School and, after serving in the Royal Corps of Signals during the First World War, came up to Wadham College on a classical scholarship. He met C. S. Lewis during his first term.

On graduating in English, Barfield remained in Oxford to write the thesis for his Blitt which became Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning (1928), a book that had a profound effect on Lewis and Tolkien. The year after it was published, however, he returned to London to assist his father in the family law firm, Barfield and Barfield. Most of his books were not written until he retired from the law in 1959. Thereafter he was a visiting scholar in many American universities, and in the United States his books have a large following.

Someone watching from the sidelines might have imagined that Barfield and Lewis were enemies. This was because, while both argued for truth, they saw things from different angles. Writing about Barfield in his 1956 book Surprised by Joy, Lewis spoke of him as a friend
 

who disagrees with you about everything. He is not so much the alter ego as the antiself. Of course he shares your interests . . . But he has approached them all at a different angle. He has read all the right books but has got all the wrong things out of every one . . . How can he be so nearly right and yet, invariably, just not right? He is as fascinating (and infuriating) as a woman. When you set out to correct his heresies, you find that he forsooth has decided to correct yours! And then you go at it, hammer and tongs, far into the night . . . more often like mutually respectful enemies than friends . . . Out of this perpetual dogfight a community of mind and a deep affection emerge . . . I think he changed me a good deal more than I him.

Lewis was an atheist until his conversion in 1933, and Barfield played a large part in bringing him to the Christian faith. His particular contribution was to demolish l’s “chronological snobbery,” which Lewis defined as “the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited.”

One of the issues Barfield was (to Lewis) so infuriating about was Anthroposophy. In 1913 Rudolf Steiner became the leader of the German section of the Theosophical Society, and over the years sought to elaborate a scientific method of studying the world of spirit. Barfield heard Steiner lecture in London in 1923 and from that time on was an enthusiastic follower. Lewis was horrified, and out of this emerged what they called their “Great War” over Anthroposophy and related issues. But the friendship remained and grew inward to the bone. Barfield's views, like Steiner’s, were rooted in Christian and Trinitarian thought, but they also embraced mysticism.

In 1923 Barfield married Matilda (“Maud”) Dewey [sic], a professional dancer and producer who had worked with Gordon Craig. They had three children, to one of whom, Lucy, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950) is dedicated.

It was during the early days of his marriage, when he was living in Long Crendon, Buckinghamshire, that some of Barfield's Barfield'smost seminal works were published. Besides Poetic Diction,, there were The Silver Trumpet (1925) and History in English Words (1926), which is not merely about the changes in the meanings of words but what he called an “evolution of consciousness.”

During his 30 years as a solicitor he helped Lewis set up the charming jeu d’espirit entitled This Ever Diverse Pair (1950), in which Barfield wrote about the tension between the demands of the legal profession and the need to live in the larger world of thought and letters.

A revolution in his life came about when Barfield was 60. Following his retirement, he found time for much he had wanted to say. In his own favourite of his books, Saving the Appearances (1957), he examines the disparity between normal consciousness and the mind of the scientist in comprehending the familar phenomena of the universe. His other works include Worlds Apart (1960) [sic]. Unancestral Voice (1965), Speaker’s Meaning  (1967), What Coleridge Thought (1971) and The Rediscovery of Meaning (1977).

Following his wife’s death, Barfield moved from their home in Dartford, Kent, in 1986 to Forest Row in Sussex. There he continued to welcome visitors, his mind as clear as always.

Owen Barfield was a small, lithe man, fond of cats and an enthusiastic walker. (He and C. S. Lewis called themselves the “Cretaceous Perambulators.”) While others were making plans for his centenary he slipped away quietly, dying peacefully at home on 14 December.

Owen Barfield, the philosopher of language and the last-surviving member of the "Inklings" circle which met in C.S. Lewis’s rooms in Oxford between 1922 and 1945, died at around 1:30 pm on Sunday December 14th. He was in his hundredth year, having turned 99 in November. Until around the middle of this year he had still been fairly active physically (and his mental faculties remained thoroughly alert until the end), but at this time a long-term digestive condition worsened significantly and he began increasingly to take to his bed. He then seemed to rally somewhat, and those who treasured his presence even hoped that he would at least reach his centenary; but he became worse again towards the end of November and finally contracted pneumonia a few days before his death. Two days before his death I visited him, together with my wife and year-old baby; and his face lit up in warm recognition, especially for the baby, whom he fondly embraced. Later that same day, another friend brought him a copy of the 1998 Golden Blade hot off the press, and Owen read the article he had written for it (with help), chuckling with amusement and approval.

Despite this very evident capacity even at the end to focus with great intensity when visited by his many friends, it was nevertheless clear that by the last few months of his life he was weary of this world, most especially of the direction certain dominant trends on the world stage were taking. Nor, to an extraordinary degree, did this have anything to do with an old man's natural wish to withdraw from active participation in life or with any sense of self-righteous rejection of new impulses. The problem was that, as had been the case for most of his life, he understood only too well; for he had in a certain sense devoted a large part of his life to laying bare the dogmas and reductionist assumptions underlying what he often referred to as the "materialistic paradigm," the conviction - or more usually the blind belief - that matter is some sort of primal cause, that mind arose from a mindless universe and that man, and his evolution, is a highly complex cosmic accident. Not that, unlike many non-believers in scientific materialism, he approached these things from the standpoint of religious belief. On the contrary, he always looked back gratefully to the mood of sceptical agnosticism in which he was brought up by his parents, and retained this approach throughout his life. Some - especially those who knew him less well - would argue that he threw this mood of sceptical inquiry to the winds when he joined the Anthroposophical Society founded by the Austrian philosopher and seer Rudolf Steiner in the early 1920s. Suffice it to say that he did not see it that way.

Arthur Owen Barfield was born on November 9th 1898 in London. His was a fairly typical middle-class upbringing. His father was a solicitor who had made good through sheer ability and hard work, while his mother was an ardent feminist, besides being a fine musician. He attended Highgate School (where Coleridge, one of his great loves, had also been a pupil). Here he met Cecil Harwood, his life-long friend, who was to be one of the founders of Michael Hall, the first Rudolf Steiner school in this country. An outstanding student, he specialized in Classics; but - after a bizarre episode following his response to his country's need of him to help fight the enemy, in the course of which his papers were lost and he saw no active service whatever, he switched to studying English Language and Literature when he went up to Wadham College, Oxford, in 1919, duly emerging with a First in 1923. At Oxford he met C. S. Lewis, his most intimate friend and chief intellectual sparring-partner; and during this time he met and married Maud Douie, an expert in folk and courtly dancing several years older than himself. However, the most important experience of these crucial formative years at Oxford was a kind of synthesis of these two elements of intellectual inquiry and romantic love. It arose out of his studies of the romantic poets, out of "a sudden and rapid increase in the intensity with which I experienced lyric poetry"; and is best expressed in his own words:
 

What impressed me particularly was the power with which not so much whole poems as particular combinations of words worked on my mind. It seemed there was some magic in it; and a magic which not only gave me pleasure but also reacted on and expanded the meanings of the individual words concerned. The second fact that made a tremendous impression on me was the way in which almost any intense experience of poetry reacted on my experience of the outer world. The face of nature, the objects of art, the events of history and human intercourse betrayed significances hitherto unknown as the result of precisely these poetic or imaginative combinations of words to which I have referred. I found I knew (there was no other word for it) things about them which I had not known before. (From the Introduction to the second edition of his book Romanticism Comes of Age, 1964.)

This was in many ways the core experience of his life; and, supported and greatly enriched by his studies of the work of Rudolf Steiner, it was transformed by his brilliant mind into a faculty of perception capable of gaining insight into not only the history of words and the origins of language but the evolution of human consciousness which, as he saw it, is the key to the whole mystery of human evolution. His basic treatise on this theme, Poetic Diction, was published in 1928, to the great admiration of T.S.Eliot among many others; and the germinal ideas on the evolution of consciousness implicit in this book were brought to clear expression in what many would regard as his masterpiece, Saving the Appearances (1957). A number of books published after the latter volume merely added further substance to what he had already written. As he would say, with his usual humor: there's only ever been one Barfield, saying the same thing over and over again - which is not say that anyone would entirely agree with him!

Barfield was, however, no ivory-tower academic. In some ways he would have liked to be: he had one of the greatest disappointments in his life when, to many people's great surprise (including Lewis's), he was not appointed as the latter's successor at Magdalen College, Oxford, in the mid-1950s. There were two main reasons for this (though these could be thought of as one) . He always had a burning interest in "real-life" questions, and wrote and published numerous essays and articles on social, political and economic themes. Nevertheless, he might have continued trying to gain some kind of livelihood as a writer even after his 500 page novel English People (1929-30), a fascinating portrayal of the ideas fermenting in the minds of many of his more aware fellow-countrymen, failed to find a publisher - had he not had a family to support (he and his wifewere childless, but they adopted two children around this time, Alexander and Lucy, and during the Second World War fostered a third, Jeffrey. ) He therefore joined his father's firm of solicitors in the mid 1930s, and this remained his daily occupation until he took retirement in 1959. After this, he and his wife duly moved to South Darenth, near Dartford, where they lived until she died in the early 1980s.

However, this was no quiet retirement in the Kent countryside but merely the beginning of another phase of active life. Towards the end of the 1950s Barfield received a phone call from one Stanley Hopper of Drew University in New Jersey, USA, inviting him to come over and teach his graduate English students (one or more of whom had become very enthusiastic about a book of his. This led to the self-effacing and very English Barfield, still suffering to some extent from a stutter which went right back to some dark fear-filled experiences he had as an adolescent during the First World·War, being greeted in 1964 as a celebrity in the American academic world, an honor which he still has never been accorded in his own land (to its eternal shame. He continued to go regularly to America for the next ten years, and again in 1978 and 1981. During this period of his life he made many friends, won numerous admirers, and even for a time became something of a cult (this was probably in the wake of the adulation being accorded to Tolkien, Barfield being somewhat too indigestible for cult-mania). He was deeply grateful to America for the recognition which it had given him.

After his "second retirement" in the early 1980s and his wife's death, he moved to The Walhatch, Forest Row, Sussex, where he spent his final years. He continued writing brief articles prefaces and reviews to many books, gave the odd lecture, even wrote a novella in his ninetieth year about the spiritual foundations of the environmental movement (Eager Spring hitherto unpublished). All who visited him with an open mind were sure to find in him the most courteous of hosts, ever ready for a profound conversation about life and its meaning but also full of an almost angelic grace, humility - to say nothing of humor. A man who had written many books which most people never read (even those who might be expected to have done so) might with justice have become bitter. Instead, he would enunciate Barfield's law of book reading; those who read it don't need it, and those who need it don't read it. Here one could encounter the man who, with C.S., Lewis, initiated the Inklings gatherings in the early 1920s, where a group of like-minded individuals - linked through friendship with Lewis but also through a common interest in mythology from a Christian viewpoint gathered simply in order to have a scintillating conversation between like-minded friends. (There were also differences of opinion, not least between Lewis and Barfield themselves.) And then there were the birthday gatherings in Barfield's smoke-filled room (he smoked the strongest of tobaccos, and would meekly assist in the emptying of a bottle.)

It must have been hard for Owen Barfield to find his bearings at the end of his long life's pilgrimage. All his contemporaries, those he had known and whose friendship he had treasured, had long died, Lewis in 1963, Harwood in 1975, to give two examples. He would often wonder why he continued to live on, as he appeared to have no fear of death. Perhaps one answer lies in the grace that those privileged to enter his room at The Walhatch experienced in his essence. Here, one might say, was a man who did not flinch from the considerable suffering that he experienced but transformed it through love into the light of wisdom. Such a quality is so rare and precious in our time that his destiny allowed him to remain with us even when his own earthly task had been completed. It is safe to say that this was a man whose greatness will be recognized more fully and richly after his death than it was while he was alive.

Those who gathered yesterday evening in the Church of the Christian Community in Forest Row to reflect on Owen Barfield’s long life will recall a mood of celebration of a life lived triumphantly and lovingly to the full. We remembered his birth in London on November 9, 1898 and the sceptical agnosticism of his close-knit family background, his education at Highgate School and his time as an undergraduate at Oxford, a period which witnessed three principal encounters of his life--with C. S. Lewis, with his wife, Maud Douie, and with Anthroposophy. We went on to trace his subsequent career as a writer, solicitor and then writer again, and the years of recognition in America. Finally, we recalled the man himself as we knew him, especially (though not only) from his last year at The Walhatch in Forest Row--his mind of extraordinary agility and alertness, his very English brand of rich humour, his kindness, thoughtfulness and his humanity.

However, beneath this surface of quite remarkable--and still insufficiently recognized--achievement there were many struggles and much suffering; and it seems to me that what was accomplished in his life by this Knight of the Word owed a great deal to the difficulties which life placed in his path and to his capacity to embrace and transform them.

In the first place there was his very marked stutter, which first became apparent during his early adolescence. According to his own account, this was in part caused by the dread with which he was filled by the first World War, which broke out when he was 16. Such was the intensity of his experience that he at time no longer wanted to wake up in the morning. He was able to transform this deep sorrow which he felt to some extent by writing poetry, a faculty which he further developed a few years later after he fell hopelessly in love with a girl, who rejected him. These experiences were the gateway to the insights which lay at the foundation of his creative writing.

Secondly, there were his struggles to find recognition--and more important--understanding as a writer and in his chosen academic field; for even while writing his B.Litt there on Poetic Diction he was by no means sure there was anything truly real in the ideal which he was developing. It must have been a great disappointment when remarkable novel English People failed to find a publisher at the beginning of the 1930s, thus leading him to embark upon a career as a lawyer. A further bitter disappointment came when, to many people’s great surprise, including C. S. Lewis himself, he was not appointed as Lewis’s successor at Magdalen College, Oxford in the mid 1950s. Rather than dwelling on these disappointments, Owen took up the new challenges life placed in his path with full enthusiasm--respectively, his work as a solicitor and his journeys to America. His response to the acute depression which assailed him in the course of the frustrations of his legal working the 1940s, was somehow symptomatic: he wrote the humorous fictional account of the travails of Burgeon and his grim alter-ego Burden, This ever Diverse Pair. Bitter disappointments and trials were thereby transformed into humorous loving warmth and humility.

Thirdly, and most important, were the struggles associated with the fact that those nearest--and dearest to him--notably his wife and Lewis--were unable to share his conviction, enormously deepened, strengthened and fortified by Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy, that in his capacity of thinking man has an instrument which can penetrate in full consciousness to insights into the world of spirit. And yet it could be safe to say that without these intellectual struggles, and the sorrow that went with them, the many books and articles that he had published on such a great variety of themes would either not have been written or would have lacked that crystal clarity of reasonable thought which is their particular treasure. Moreover, in the case of both Maud and Lewis his persistence was rewarded. Maud joined the Anthroposophical Society at the end of her long life out of love for her husband; and in his last sermons Lewis was able to acknowledge the validity of the imagination as a tool of intellectual research, something which he had utterly dismissed in the aftermath of his "Great War" with Barfield at the end of the 1920s.

Today we remember a man, who, we may say with confidence, will grow in stature as the coming century dawns and as it become more possible to appreciate what he achieve; and we do so with gratitude in our hearts that he was able to be with us for so long.

The funeral took place at Worth Crematorium at 3 pm, Thursday, December 18th, 1997.

Alexander Barfield, his wife and son Owen were present, as was Jeffrey Barfield. Flowers for the family were taken afterwards to Lucy Barfield, who is severely crippled with multiple sclerosis.

Walter Hooper, one of Owen’s literary executors, was also present, together with three members of the Oxford University C. S. Lewis Society.

The Anthroposophical Society of Great Britain was represented by its Chairman and General Secretary, Nick Thomas, who attended with his life Heather. Also present were several of Owen’s friends and admirers within the Anthroposophical Society. . . . .

At Owen’s request, the second (slow) movement of Beethoven’s "Spring Sonata" was played (at the Memorial Gathering on Wednesday evening) and Bach’s "Sheep May Safely Graze" at the funeral itself . . . .