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That you keep talking, davem, about mountains as "just material objects" points to how our language has developed into all the abstract distinctions that split off the abstract from substance. Not that this is bad, but it has come at a price.
What Barfield was saying, and what Tolkien built into the aesthetic experience that is LotR, is that we are meant to see mountains neither as big rocks, nor as symbols of spiritual things; rather, we are meant to see mountains as a unity. Think of Caradhras. No mountain has as much personality as Caradhras; but to say that Tolkien was using personification, severely understates the case. He was communicating that particular mountain to be perceived by (most) readers the way a pre-modern would perceive it, before all the abstract distinctions pulled away from the mountain all those things premoderns understood it to contain.
"Our stories" about mountains are quite a different thing than what individuals tell themselves. "Our stories" speaks to a communal experience that a culture, or part of a culture shares. There's a richness in that compared to the relative bankruptcy (pun not intended but I'll leave it there) of individualistic reinterpretations.
As to Tolkien and Williams, the Letters speak to the fact that they had a great frienship and quite enjoyed each other during Inklings meetings. Still, their creative imaginations ran along decidedly different paths. If not for Lewis, there never would have been a Tolkien/Williams friendship.
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