"Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again."

Art by Pauline Baynes

Dear Neighbors:

A few days ago I stumbled across a piece of text which sent me down a very interesting rabbit hole. As so often happens when you jump into a literary, historical, or scientific inquiry, you work backwards from your source material until you find what is the 'beginning' of the story that you are following. 

   The text that I found was the dedication that C.S. wrote in the first edition of his book The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. It reads:

My Dear Lucy,

I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realised that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it. I shall probably be too deaf to hear, and too old to understand, a word you say, but I shall still be

your affectionate Godfather,

C.S. Lewis

I was immediately drawn to it because I love the idea of a adult one day being "old enough to read fairy tales again." Many adults are of the opinion that they should only read books that are written for adults. With all due respect, this idea, dear neighbors, is utter piffle. Some of the most beautiful writing ever created can be found in children's literature. I should know. I have reviewed almost ten thousand children's literature titles.

   Being a person with what some might call an excess of curiosity, I began to wonder who Lucy was. It turns out that she was the daughter of a man called Owen Barfield. Owen was a writer and philosopher, best known these days not so much for his own writing but for his membership in the Inklings, which included both C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. The Inklings were a group of writers and thinkers who met regularly in a pub in Oxford to talk about anything and everything. 

   Owen was born in Muswell Hill, Middlesex, the youngest child of a solicitor and a fervent suffragette. His mother educated him until he went to Highgate School at the age of eight. He won a scholarship to Wadham College, Oxford, to study the classics, but left before matriculation in order to serve in the Great War as a wireless officer in the Royal Engineers.

  In 1919 he returned to Oxford,  transferring from the classics to English Language and Literature. In his first term he met C.S. Lewis and they went on to be close friends for forty-four years. "It is no exaggeration to say that his friendship with Barfield was one of the most important in his [Lewis's] life..." The friendship was reciprocal. Almost a year after Lewis's death, Barfield spoke of his friendship in a talk that he gave: "Now, whatever he was, and as you know, he was a great many things, C.S. Lewis was for me, first and foremost, the absolutely unforgettable friend, the friend with whom I was in close touch for over forty years, the friend you might come to regard hardly as another human being, but almost as a part of the furniture of my existence."

   Owen is often referred to as "the first and last Inkling." He had a profound influence on C. S. Lewis and, through his books The Silver Trumpet and Poetic Diction (dedicated to Lewis), he also greatly influenced J. R. R. Tolkien. Tolkien was inspired by Owen's theme of the decline and fall of a civilization and through his writings, and their conversations, persuaded both Tolkien and Lewis that myth and metaphor have always had a central place in language and literature.

   In 1923 Owen married Maud Douie, who was a musician and dancer. They had three children: Alexander, born in 1928, his younger sister Lucy, born on 2 November 1935 and Geoffrey, born in 1940, who was a foster child. In May of 1949, Lewis sent Lucy, who was his goddaughter, the completed manuscript of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe with a letter in which he wrote that the book had been written for her. In addition, he named the most interesting of the Pevensie children Lucy. On the 16th of October 1950, when the book was officially published in London, this letter was printed as its dedication.