The First and Last Inkling
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This article by Simon Blaxland-de Lange was first published in New Economy , a journal of associative economics, in its March/April 1997 edition. It is apparent from the text that it was written in 1996. As Blaxland-de Lange notes, in an endnote in his biography of Barfield, to some extent the article is the fruit of conversations with Barfield which they had, while he was also engaging with him…
Ninety years ago, on April 3, 1936, The Spectator published a letter to the editor by Owen Barfield, which it headlined “Nationalism and Economics”. The letter, about the reality of the world’s economic life and the failure of that reality to be reflected in relations between nation-states, repays attention in 2026. The states uppermost in our minds have changed, and to some extent so have the raw…
A transcript of a talk given by Simon Blaxland-de Lange on 30 th March 2025 during the marking of the centenary of Rudolf Steiner’s death at Rudolf Steiner House, London. It is a symptom of the present condition of earthly humanity that many people would say that one cannot realistically speak of something such as “world culture”. Quite apart from the inherent problems of trying to define any kind…
In his lectures, Rudolf Steiner spoke on a number of occasions about the enactment of a decree at the 8th Ecumenical Council in Constantinople in the year 869 – in defiance of the view of the Eastern Church, represented by Patriarch Photius – to the effect that man does not have a spirit but only a soul with certain spiritual attributes. Steiner adds that the Catholic Church has done its best to…
In November 2024, I wrote on this blog about what was then the planned publication in 2025 of a new edition of Owen Barfield’s fairy-tale, The Silver Trumpet. Specifically I noted that it would be published by the Barfield Press on the 100th anniversary of its first publication. That gave rise, as I wrote, to a particular curiosity: I had been wondering recently precisely when in 1925 the book was…
I’m incredibly fortunate to be a piano teacher and music composition instructor to students of all ages a few days each week. I also perform, compose, create content for YouTube, and write music education books. My time is spent nurturing the imagination. As Samuel Taylor Coleridge beautifully put it, “The primary Imagination I hold to be … a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of…
It is fair to say that there is a feeling of activity and liveliness with everything that touches on Owen Barfield at the moment. Maybe what will turn out to be important in this in the long run is the connections that may be formed between people interested in Barfield’s writing and thinking about thinking. That is not at all to say that the thinking merely underwrites the forming of communities…
We are haunted by Martin Heidegger. Even if you’ve never read a word of his dense philosophical texts, his ghost walks beside you, shaping how you imagine your place in the world. His spectral influence permeates our modern consciousness, guiding how we understand our relationship to reality, technology, and meaning itself. Heidegger’s philosophical project emerged as a desperate attempt to…
We hope those who have got a copy of the new edition of The Silver Trumpet in the two months have enjoyed reading it, or are enjoying it. This post is a brief one, by way of information, of news after the new edition’s publication. Online Event Whether you have read The Silver Trumpet or not, you may be interested in an online event being held next month by the Inkling Folk Fellowship , details as…
The new edition of The Silver Trumpet has now been published! It is a delight for the Barfield Press to publish this tale, the first work of fantasy by the group of writers that came to be known as the Inklings, on the centenary of its first publication in 1925. The blurb is as follows: The Silver Trumpet was the first children’s fantasy story to be published by one of the Inklings. Its early…
