Arthur Owen Barfield (9 November 1898 – 14 December 1997) was an English philosopher, author, poet, critic, and member of the Inklings.

He was educated at Highgate School and Wadham College, Oxford and in 1920 received a first class degree in English language and literature.

[2] Tolkien embedded this into his legendarium through the device of repeated fragmentation, of the created light, of language, and of peoples especially in the sundering of the Elves.

[3] Barfield's contribution, and their conversations, persuaded both Tolkien and Lewis that myth and metaphor have always had a central place in language and literature.

"The Inklings work... taken as a whole, has a significance that far outweighs any measure of popularity, amounting to a revitalisation of Christian intellectual and imaginative life.

[8] Through their conversations, Lewis gave up materialist realism – the idea that our sensible world is self-explanatory and is all that there is – and moved closer to what he had always disparagingly referred to as "supernaturalism.

Lewis wrote his 1949 book The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the first Narnia chronicle, for his friend's daughter Lucy Barfield and dedicated it to her.

He dedicated his first scholarly book, The Allegory of Love (1936) to his 'wisest and best of my unofficial teachers,' stating in its preface that he asked no more than to disseminate Barfield's literary theory and practice.

[11] In the third lecture of The Abolition of Man (1947), Lewis suggests that Barfield's mentor, Rudolf Steiner, may have found the way to a "redeemed scientific method that does not omit the qualities of the observed object".

In a letter to C. A. Furth of Allen and Unwin in 1937, Tolkien wrote, "the only philological remark (I think) in The Hobbit is...: an odd mythological way of referring to linguistic philosophy, and a point that will (happily) be missed by any who have not read Barfield (few have), and probably by those who have.

It has roots in the Platonic idea of methexis passed on by Augustine and Aquinas, and offered a sacramental view of reality which Tolkien takes up in The Ring in, for example, the contemplative artistry and natural oneness of the elves, Tom Bombadil and the Hobbits' simple pleasures.

This part of Barfield's literary work includes the book The Case for Anthroposophy containing his Introduction to selected extracts from Steiner's Riddles of the Soul.

In her book Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien's World, Verlyn Flieger analyses the influence of Barfield's Poetic Diction on the writing of J.R.R.

[21] More recent discussions of Barfield's work are published in Stephen Talbott's The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our Midst, Neil Evernden's The Social Creation of Nature, Daniel Smitherman's Philosophy and the Evolution of Consciousness, Morris Berman's The Reenchantment of the World, and Gary Lachman's A Secret History of Consciousness.

"[25] The culture critic and psychologist James Hillman called Barfield "one of the most neglected important thinkers of the 20th Century".

Barfield has been held in high esteem by many contemporary poets, including Robert Kelly, Charles Stein, George Quasha, Tom Cheetham, and others.

Barfield uses numerous examples to demonstrate that words originally had a unified "concrete and undivided" meaning, which we now distinguish as several distinct concepts.

It is a fictional dialogue between a physicist, a biologist, a psychiatrist, a lawyer-philologist (who might be taken for Barfield himself), a linguistic analyst (more or less the villain), a theologian (who has reminded some readers of C. S. Lewis), a retired Waldorf School teacher, and a young man employed at a rocket research station.

During a period of three days, the characters discuss and debate first principles, occasioned at first by the observation that the various branches of modern thought seem to be taking for granted an incompatibility with one another.

In our daily, uncritical thinking, on the other hand, we take for granted the solid, objective reality of the familiar world, assume an objective, lawful manifestation of its qualities such as color, sound, and solidity, and even write natural scientific treatises about the history of its phenomena—all while ignoring the human consciousness that (by our own, critical account) determines these phenomena from the inside in a continually changing way.