tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2410716623228444076.post781043925525347834..comments2024-03-14T06:20:59.015+00:00Comments on The Notion Club Papers - an Inklings blog: Tolkien and Barfield, Fantasy and Imagination - unexplored linksBruce Charltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09615189090601688535noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2410716623228444076.post-60004267834285955142017-10-04T09:59:52.536+01:002017-10-04T09:59:52.536+01:00@Keri. Indeed. As you know, Owen Barfield also con...@Keri. Indeed. As you know, Owen Barfield also contributed an essay to Essays Presented to Charles Williams, and no doubt read the rest of the volume including Tolkien's essay. I imagine that the Epilogue of On Fairy Stories would have made a strong impression in elation to Barfield's interests. <br /><br />http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/tolkiens-epilogue-to-on-fairy-stories.htmlBruce Charltonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09615189090601688535noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2410716623228444076.post-36854692647253718532017-10-04T07:30:58.737+01:002017-10-04T07:30:58.737+01:00Before reading this I hadn't thought about Ba...Before reading this I hadn't thought about Barfield's relationship to Tolkien's work. I think Barfield was primarily friends with Lewis of course Tolkien was part of the circle and I have seen that Tolkien was influenced by Barfield's work but not the other way around. I hadn't realised that Barfield didn't enjoy the Lord of the Rings, a shame. And of course although we regard Barfield as an Inkling he wasn't going to most of the Inkling meetings as he didn't live in Oxford for most of the time the Inklings meetings were happening. I imagine he wouldn't have been able to help thinking about Tolkien's work more deeply had he done so. <br /><br />I was then interested to read in an essay "The Harp and the Camera" from his collection the Rediscovery of Meaning the following passage that sites Tolkien's On Fairy Stories and interestingly for me also Novalis and George MacDonald;<br /><br />""If the eye were not of the same nature as the light, it could never behold the light." If then the story of the harp and the camera is to continue instead of ending with a whimper, it will have to be by way of a true marriage between the one and the other. Is it fanciful, I wonder, to think of a sort of mini-harp stretched across the window of the eye — an Apollo's harp if you will — as perhaps not a bad image for the joy of looking with imagination? That "joy," as will be well-known here, was precisely the thing which C. S. Lewis spent most of his life discovering more about, discovering in particular that it is by no means the same thing as pleasure or happiness or contentment. In a literary climate which has already become all camera and no harp, all signature and no archetype, we ought not to forget that little group, if group is the right word, which has sometimes been referred to as "Oxford Christians," and sometimes as "Romantic theologians," and with which this college has, thanks to the devotion and energy of Dr. Kilby, established a very special connection. For they may perhaps have contributed their mite to the continuation of the story. The German poet and thinker Novalis, you know, specifically compared with an aeolian harp the Marchen or adult fairy tale, that modern variant of the myth, in which signature may mingle fruitfully with archetype, but without swamping it altogether. The passage where he does so was selected by George MacDonald as the motto to his own Marchen, Phantastes, which played (as he has told us) such a crucial part in the literary and spiritual development of C. S. Lewis. Besides giving us Marchen of their own, both Lewis and Tolkien, and their comrade in arms Charles Williams, thought deeply and wrote well on the place of myth and Marchen in our modern consciousness. One way or another, they were all three concerned with the problem of imagination; and there is perhaps no piece of writing that deals more gently and genially with the place of imagination in the literature of the future than Tolkien's essay "On Fairy-Stories" in the volume Essays Presented to Charles Williams. At least that is so, if I am right in suggesting (as I have been trying to suggest by my own rather devious route) that the ultimate question, to which imagination holds the key, is the question of how we can learn to sign our own names to what we create, whether as myth or in other ways, but so nevertheless that what we sign as our own will also be the name of Another the name I would venture to say, without venturing to pronounce it, of the Author and the Lord of the archetypes themselves."Keri Fordhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14386177565660630959noreply@blogger.com