LOTRO Beneath Your Feet

Goldenstar of A Casual Stroll to Mordor joined me this week for a trip  to the great lake of Eriador. The ruins of Annuminas, the remnant of  Rangers, the sheer beauty of the vista make this an amazingly scenic  zone.

I'm often concerned with the number of proper nouns I use in this show;  if you've never read the Silmarillion, it can be a problem. Who are the  Noldor? The Vanyar? The Edain? Who are the Valar? My hope is that this  episode will fill in some of those gaps for those of you less familiar  with the deeper histories of Middle-earth

Ah, Bree. That quiet crossroads of a village. This week I took a stroll  through Bree, musing on its sturdy history. Not unlike the other  episodes so far, it's hard to sift through and figure out which  information to pack into the tiny amount of allotted time.

This episode was quite difficult, as it is such a rich zone in locale  and history. I didn't want to overload anyone with a huge amount of  information and proper nouns, but I didn't want to dilute anything. I  wanted to talk about the vistas but not dwell on them. I also wanted to  talk mostly about the mountains proper, and not the lowlands included in  the same zone in LotRO (Falathlorn and the like); those are for another  episode.

Initially I thought that perhaps Hobbiton was too small a space to do a  show on but, as you might suspect, so much as a chip opened up a good  deal of information to include. It's fun to know that with almost every  bit of real estate in Middle-earth there is at least a ladle-full of  history, if not a flood.