Transcript
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Well, I'd like to start, if I may.
But just for this group, I need to say some words
by way of introduction, which is thank you
very much for having us here.
This is a great occasion for all of us
to recreate what the Inklins are.
And I think the Inklins still live, if you like.
Their spirit lives.
And this is what we're exploring and seeing
take that forward. In my case, I've always been Owen Barfield all my life and
grandfather's been grandfather all my life, but my journey with the Inklings
has only been 15 years or so since I was appointed as literary trustee and I kind
of started looking into his work, reading his work and studying his work. And from
time to time, very rarely I get invited to give a talk, sometimes here at Oxford
as well. And whenever I'm at Oxford, I always start or try to say, if there's anyone in
the room, any academics who can read and explain, particularly Barfield, please step forward
because I don't really want to be here. I'd rather somebody else be here doing this right
now. But there just is nobody. You wouldn't have found a stand in. So I'm sorry, but it
has to be me. But who knows, maybe one day somebody will step forward. And I don't think
it's because people at Oxford University are particularly dim. Also you might have your
own opinions about that. I think it's because it's sort of counter-cultural, you know, and
it's even more counter-cultural to be an Inkling now than when the Inklings were being Inklings.
So even then it was unfashionable to talk about things like Christ. Now, you know, you
really be putting yourself outside of the norm to talk about Christ. So I think there's
maybe that and we need to overcome it and find those champions that will come forward.
Since in 15 years of asking I've had no response at all from anybody, I'm going to try another
tat and I'm going to say there were some clever people, their names were Lewis and Tolkien.
they heard what grandfather was telling them, they listened carefully and they applied it
in their fictional work, their fantasy literature incorporated Bartheldean philosophy and they
were phenomenally successful as Oxford academics. Now other people have also incorporated grandfather's
philosophy and probably he was most popular in the 1970s because he was a professor in
America then. And there were some Americans like Saul Bellow and Howard Nemiroff. Howard
Nemiroff went off and he was poet laureate for America and Pulitzer Prize winner. And
even right now there's a lady called Susanna Clark and she's written a novel called Piranesi.
She was told about Barfield through Malcolm Gite and Piranesi's just won the 2021 Women's
prize for fiction. So if you read Barfield and understand what he said and apply it to
your fiction, I'm not saying that you will be instantly successful, but I'm saying your
life will be incredibly enriched. You will be like Tolkien. You'll never be able to see
the world again. Everything will take on a new meaning to you. So I think I've said enough,
Yeah, please can someone start looking at this? Right, when I was asked to pick something to
read, I thought, okay, what do I do? And I thought, well, I'll just start at the beginning.
So the first in clean book that was ever published was a fairy tale by Barfield. And Barfield shared
it with his best friend, C.S. Lewis. And Lewis had shared it with his friend, Tolkien, when Tolkien
had kids. Both of them had really admired it. Tolkien in particular, because he got the feedback
from the children as he read it to the children. They didn't want the book to be handed back to
Lewis and Lewis fed that back to Barthew. So let's start at the beginning. So this is a book
that was published in 1925. It was published by Faber and Gwyer who are the precursors to
Faber and Faber and this is the year that T.S. Eliot joined Faber and Faber and T.S. Eliot and
Barfield knew each other very well and there's a sort of a long relationship there. So let's just
start with the reading and I'll stand up if you don't mind. It's not too long this reading but
here we are. The Silver Trumpet by Owen Barfield, part one, chapter one. So it starts like this.
Once upon a time there were two little princesses whose names were Violetta and Gambetta and they
lived in Mountaigne Castle. They were twins, and they were so like each other that when Violetta
came in from a walk with her feet wet, Gambetta was sometimes told to go and change her stockings
because the Queen couldn't tell which from the other. But that didn't happen often because if
Princess Violetta was out for a walk, Princess Gambetta was almost sure to be with her. Indeed,
they were so fond of one another that you might have thought they were tied together with a string.
All the same, the Queen used to be so fussed and worried by the confusion that, what with
one thing and another, she persuaded the King to appoint a special Lord to distinguish between
them. And he was called the Lord Highteller of Other from Which. The first thing he did
after he was given this office was to decree that everyone should call them by shorter
names because, as he said, their names both ended with -etta and that made it much harder to tell.
"Why does it make it harder to tell?" said the king. "I don't see why it should make it harder."
"Never mind why, your majesty," the lord highteller replied firmly, "but it does."
"Very well," said his majesty, "I think you are rather a fool, but I will do as you say and I will
see that my subjects do as you say because this is your job and not mine and he went off hunting.
So after that one of the sisters was called princess violet and the other was called
princess gamboy. Now as it happens the lord Hytela the other from which was not a fool at all but a
very wise man and he had noticed something about the two little princesses which nobody else had
noticed. Moreover, he knew a great deal about the magic power of names. For soon after he had given
them these new names, everybody else began to notice the same thing too. And before very long,
it was the rarest thing in the world for anybody about the court to mistake one for the other.
But first, you must know how it came about that these two princesses were so much alike,
even after they were quite tall girls.
Right.
I mean, people are probably unfamiliar with this book, and I
can't hold that against you because it's not published. So
one of the things I want to do is find a publisher, you know,
there's so many things to do, but they're publishing this book
is one on my to-do list. But I was wondering, well somebody's got to say something about
this book so we might as well see what grandfather said about it. And so grandfather explained
that this book, this story of his, he wanted it for general consumption, a children's story,
but he wanted to bring out the importance of the romantic element in relationships between
a man and a woman. But more widely than that, the importance of the feeling element in life.
And the silver trumpet of the title is a symbol of the feeling element in life, which gets
hidden and then is discovered again.
So that feeling element as grandfather understood it is really a spiritual attribute of the
soul.
There are three principal spiritual attributes.
is the central one, which is bounded on both sides by thought and will, an active and a
passive. So you have this idea of active, passive and rhythm with feeling in the middle
as a spiritual element of the soul. And of course, there's a prince that comes into the
story and the princess marries the prince. And the princess is again, that soul uniting
with the higher ego, if you like. So this is kind of the narrative of grandfather, which
he was consistent. Everything he wrote was the same thing. So grandfather said, "I just
said the same thing time and time again. I just wrote it different ways. Plays, novels,
fairy tales, everything. He was just saying the same thing, which is that we have a soul,
a spiritual component to that soul, and there's a destiny to sort of find our ego, if you
like. Was that the only fairy tale he wrote? He wrote some others, shorter ones, but this
was published by Faber and Fager. It's very early for the Inklings group. You think of
them as fairy tale writers, but that precedes, I mean, you can really see it appealing to
Lewis and Tolkien, certainly in the way that Lewis was such a fan of the George McDonald
sort of Curdie stories. It feels in that kind of, that sort of genre to me. Proof of concept
as well, because I think they would have got the philosophy that lies behind it. There
was already a philosophy there.
Yeah. And the idea of two indistinguishable twins with similar names also makes me think
of the horse and his boy.
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was written for and dedicated to Lucy Barthew, my aunt.
And he, you know, what Lewis was the Godfather of Lucy. So he was kind of involved with the
Bartholdt children as well.
Yeah, absolutely. Well, there's that wonderful letter at the beginning, isn't there, where
he says, you know, I wrote this for you and you're a girl, but probably by the time, because
you grow up faster than I write stories. By the time I finished it, you'd be too old to
read it.
But they're never too old really, you know, to read the underlying message from the photo.
That theme of names and the magic of names was something that all the A-pins share.
Yeah, I tried to emphasize that bit, the magic of names. And Grandfather's next book was
History in English Words. So his theme was the evolution of consciousness, that's what
his theme was. But he looked at it in evidence in language, which is where he connected with
Tolkien and philology, they were both philologists and their love of language.
And that book on poetic diction. Poetic diction came next. Poetic diction was his thesis at Oxford
University which he had written as an undergraduate but he couldn't find a supervisor. Nobody could
supervise him writing that book so he just like hung there and then a few years later he published it
having dedicated it to Lewis of course. And Lewis referred to it all the time in his lectures.
Yes, I'd say Charles Williams, maybe we can say a bit more about this later, but he saw himself
as carrying forward a poetic tradition and he's clearly astutely older poets like Swinburne and
kind of going right back to Shakespeare and Spencer and how he constructs his verse. And
I wasn't really in fashion at the time. What was in fashion was more like the love song of J. Alfred
Prufrock and Elliot and that school, Pound and the rest of it. And Williams didn't see himself as
doing something that was in fashion necessarily, but really speaking to what he saw as important.
Perhaps with that kind of fairytale mode being not something that Williams ever did, but in that
same vein of wanting to find the true and represent it in a way that's startling to the
current age?
Well, poetry is keen there because both Lewis and Barford, when they first met each other,
saw themselves as poets first and foremost. They had a kind of self-image as poets, but
they were undergraduates. Neither of them were that successful as poets, it should be
said. But Grandfather wrote long narrative poems and he finally got it published two
years ago. So the Tower, which he wrote, has only just been published. And his long novel
has yet to be published. So, you know, this is a story that's still unfolding. So his
novel is called English People, yet to be published. So there we have it. But yeah,
they were introduced together as, oh, you two are poets, you'll get on. And they kind
to do. So poetry is very important and seeing themselves as a poet and the romantic element
in life as well, which is what the fairy tale brings through.
I don't know how encouraging this is for the creative writing team here, who are hoping
to get published within the next century.
I'm just saying you had to take a long overview. I mean, grandfather always said that, well,
I don't know if he always said it, he told me once. So it was 1985 and I was helping
pack up some stuff because he was moving from one place to another. And he said, you know,
it'll be 50 years before my work is sort of accepted or acceptable in society. So 50 years
takes us to 2035. So, you know, the fact that we're even talking about it now, we're ahead
of the curve. So well done on being here. But I think he's, I think he was right. You
he was right about a lot of things and I think he was right about that too. The society is just not
yet ready to hear what he was saying. A few intelligent people could pick it up like Lewis
and Tolkien and they could incorporate it in the word. And I always thought that Lewis was a sort
of signpost to Tolkien, you know, that they worked on that level that Lewis was writing for the
contemporary audience then and through Lewis they'll find Barfield. But if you know Barfield
and then read back Lewis as I've started to do, you know, it's incredible the sort of
richness that you can get out of Lewis because you're sort of reading back and you're seeing
so much more of what he's saying, knowing what Barfield was saying.
Because they were talking together all the time.
And that's just starting to emerge. So there's a sort of C.S. Lewis scholar who just on Facebook
I noticed he made a remark and he said when Lewis talks about language and magic in that
hideous strength, that book, the hideous strength, he's dripping with Barfield. So I mean that
was last week. I stuck that on Facebook. I'm just trying to show that people are starting
to come to become aware of it. So if you want to say something original about C.S. Lewis
and over dinner we would discuss in how many books we think have been published by C.S.
Lewis, on C.S. Lewis and the consensus was around 10,000 books have been written about
him. If you want to say something new, read Barfield and then talk about Lewis. I've got
another little note that I wrote to myself which is, people were saying, "Well who is
body? Who is this body? He's really the Inklings to the Inklings, like a sort of a catchphrase,
if you like. So not only the first and last Inklings, but he was the Inklings' Inklings.
And in a way that refers to kind of the Apostle's Apostle, Mary Madeline,
she's sort of in the background, hidden, doesn't get a prominent role, but you know,
so much there, so much presence, so it's so important, bringing in an element that would
otherwise be missing. So I quite like that phrase as well. If anyone's got something else to say
relating to that fairy tale or fairy tales in general, speak now because otherwise we'll move
on to our next Inkling, which Colin, is you representing Tolkien?
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