The Classical Mind

In this season finale of The Classical Mind, Father Wesley Walker and Dr. Junius Johnson bring their epic journey through J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy to a close with The Return of the King. Picking up from the alternating structural threads of the narrative, Junius and Wesley delve into why Book Five stands out as a high-water mark for epic storytelling. They unpack Tolkien’s mastery of war narrative—drawing comparisons to Homer’s Iliad—showing how Middle-earth’s sweeping macro-level conflicts are fundamentally decided by micro-level acts of individual courage and moral choice.

Endnotes:

* Junius: Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay

* Wesley: The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King video game

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Dr. Junius Johnson and Fr. Wesley Walker are joined by poet-priest-scholar Malcolm Guite for a deep dive into J.R.R. Tolkien’s unfinished alliterative poem, The Fall of Arthur — and make the case that it deserves to be read as seriously as anything else in Tolkien’s body of work.

Recommended Reading

* Malcolm: The Inklings and King Arthur, ed. Sørina Higgins

* Junius: Marie Borroff’s translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

* Wesley: Malcolm Guite’s Galahad and the Grail (with The Coming of Arthur forthcoming in November)

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The middle book of a trilogy is always the dark one, and The Two Towers is no exception. Fr. Wesley Walker and Dr. Junius Johnson return to Middle-earth for the second leg of The Lord of the Rings, and this time things really are on the edge of the knife.

Gollum, Hugh of Saint Victor, Ents and the Entmoot, Gimli, Sarumon and Gandalf, and Boromir and Faramir. It’s all there!

Endnotes

* Junius: Tolkien’s The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún

* Wesley’s endnote: Realms of Tolkien: Images of Middle-earth

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Warning: this episode discusses the film in full, spoilers included. If you haven’t seen it yet, go watch it first and come back.

Fr. Wesley Walker and Dr. Junius Johnson head to the theater for another Classical Mind Goes to the Movies episode, this time tackling Christopher Nolan’s big-screen adaptation of The Odyssey.

Have you seen Nolan's The Odyssey? Let us know what you thought in the comments or in our community chat on Substack.

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Everyone knows The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia. Fewer people know the full story of the friendship that helped make both of them possible. In this special bonus episode, Dr. Junius Johnson sits down with Kirk Manton of Eastgate Creative to talk about The Forge of Friendship, a five-part documentary series, ten years in the making, telling the story of the relationship between J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.

Dr. Manton walks through how the project began small and grew into a multi-part documentary spanning the two writers’ entire life together, and how, along the way, the project itself became something of a case study in its own subject: it has connected Tolkien fans and Lewis fans, two overlapping but distinct communities, into new friendships of their own. Junius and Kirk also discuss what makes the Lewis-Tolkien friendship worth telling in this much depth, why Eastgate Creative chose to build this project as a donor-funded nonprofit rather than a traditional investor-backed production, and what’s still ahead as the documentary moves through post-production toward release.

This is a great listen for anyone who loves Tolkien, Lewis, or the Inklings — and a chance to support a project built entirely on donations from people who believe this story is worth telling well.

Support the Project

Eastgate Creative has funded this documentary entirely through donations — no investors, no profit distributions. Every dollar goes straight into finishing the production and funding the next generation of Christian filmmakers.

* Watch the trailer & learn more: eastgatecreative.org

* Sign up for updates: Join the Eastgate Creative newsletter

* Donate directly: Support The Forge of Friendship

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theclassicalmind.com/subscribe

The Lord of the Rings didn’t just launch a genre — it set the standard every fantasy writer since has been measured against. This month, Fr. Wesley Walker and Dr. Junius Johnson begin their journey through J.R.R. Tolkien’s masterpiece with The Fellowship of the Ring, the first volume of the trilogy that turned Middle-earth into the mythology of the modern imagination.

In this episode, Wesley and Junius explore what actually sets Tolkien apart from the fantasy writers who came before, and the flood of imitators who came after. They dig into Tolkien’s remarkable balancing act: a world built with more depth and history than perhaps any fictional world ever created, yet worn so lightly that you never have to read a page of the appendices to feel its weight. They trace the providence that runs quietly beneath the entire tale — the “hand that is not Gandalf’s” guiding events from the moment Bilbo is chosen for the quest in The Hobbit — and ask what it means that Middle-earth’s races are written almost as facets of human nature itself, essential yet never simple.

The conversation also turns to Frodo: is he really the hero of the story, or is that title quietly earned by someone else? Wesley and Junius make the case that Frodo’s heroism isn’t the sword-and-glory kind; it’s the daily, unglamorous courage of simply doing the next right thing, again and again, all the way to Mount Doom.

Along the way: the structure of the six “books” hidden inside the trilogy, the guerrilla-war tension of hobbits slipping across a Shire already crawling with Nazgûl, and why the Council of Elrond marks the one time the Fellowship, as a whole, actually exists.

Endnotes

* Junius: The Children of Húrin by J.R.R. Tolkien

* Wesley’s endnote: The Fellowship of the Ring trick-taking card game

Next month: The journey continues with The Two Towers!

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Discover the official Season 5 reading schedule for The Classical Mind podcast! Join Junius and Wesley as they lay out the next 12-month literary journey through the Western canon.

Here is the list:

* October 2026: Theogony by Hesiod

* December 2026: The Life of Moses by Gregory of Nyssa

* January: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

* February 2027: Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne

* March: Hamlet by William Shakespeare

* April: Timaeus by Plato

* May: Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

* June: Silence by Shusaku Endo

* July: The Odyssey by Homer

* August: Principles of Human Knowledge by George Berkeley

* Season Conclusion: The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas

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In this summer episode of The Classical Mind, hosts Dr. Junius Johnson and Father Wesley Walker welcome back three-time guest Heidi White, co-host of the Close Reads podcast and author of The Divided Soul. Together, the trio dives deep into William Shakespeare’s beloved masterpiece, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, analyzing its intricate narrative layers through the compelling lens of duty versus desire.

While often celebrated for its lighthearted magical antics and brilliant comedic performance, the hosts unpack the surprisingly dark premise that sets the play in motion: forced marriages, legal coercion, and the stripping away of individual autonomy. From the rigid laws of Athens to the chaotic, transformative "green world" of the forest, this conversation explores how Shakespeare juxtaposes cold logic with wild imagination.

Endnotes

* Heidi: The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

* Junius: Dear Brutus by J.M. Barrie

* Wesley: The Hazards of Love by the Decemberists

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Welcome to another episode of The Classical Mind, the podcast where we explore the great books of the Western tradition! In this episode, hosts Father Wesley Walker and Dr. Junius Johnson are thrilled to welcome a special guest, Dr. Grace Hamman. Dr. Hamman holds a PhD from Duke University, focuses on late medieval poetry and contemplative writing, and hosts the Old Books with Grace podcast. Together, they dive into a delightful and deep discussion about Oscar Wilde’s brilliant drawing-room comedy, The Importance of Being Earnest.

Endnotes

* Junius: Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales—The Happy Prince, The Nightingale and the Rose, and The Selfish Giant

* Wesley: Ricky Stanicky

* Grace: Arrested Development

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In this concluding chapter of our journey through Dante’s Commedia, Dr. Junius Johnson and Fr. Wesley Walker are joined by Dr. Jonathan Juilfs to explore the radiant heights of Paradiso. The conversation centers on the idea that the third canticle is not a boring landscape of static perfection, but rather the very “point” of the entire project grounded in the medieval understanding of capacity and divine alignment.

Endnotes:

* Dr. Juilfs:

* The Pearl

* The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius

* What Dreams May Come

* Wesley: Little Gidding from Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot

* Junius:

* The Discarded Image by C.S. Lewis

* The Last Battle by C.S. Lewis

* Perelandra by C.S. Lewis

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