Tolkien Professor Podcast Updates

Hello Everybody, and welcome!

Recently, I made some changes to the Tolkien Professor podcast with the help of my Digital Media team over at Signum University. I wanted to make sure you were all aware in case you had any questions or wondered why some things had moved around a bit.

First of all, we’ve moved to a new podcast service called Fireside. In addition to cozy feeling of the name – who wouldn’t want to listen to a podcast while sitting next to a nice, warm fire? – this new service offers a lot of great options for helping people find The Tolkien Professor on their favorite podcasting app. The podcast has long been available on iTunes, and some other apps and aggregation services have picked it up from there over the years. Fireside makes it easier to integrate with many more services, and already we’ve been able to add the podcast to some places that hadn’t picked it up yet, including Spotify and Google Play. To view all of available options, visit the Tolkien Professor subscription page. (Note that you can still add the RSS feed directly to your favorite app, if it’s not listed there.)

The second major change is that I have now moved my Exploring The Lord of the Rings program, sponsored by the Mythgard Institute, to its own dedicated podcast feed. There are a couple of reasons for doing this. Foremost, in recent months, we had been receiving a lot of inquiries from listeners about the podcast not updating properly or having a hard time finding older episodes. As it turns out, iTunes seems to be the main culprit, as Apple appears to limit the number of episodes that can appear in a podcast – other podcast apps, like Overcast, do not seem to have such a limit. Furthermore, Exploring The Lord of the Rings has become quite popular in its own right, and it seemed like it was time to give it an outlet of its own. All of my other Tolkien-related content will remain on the Tolkien Professor podcast for now, but if you want to keep listening to Exploring The Lord of the Rings, you will need to add it. You can find the subscription page here.

Let me take a moment to also mention another great new podcast you may be interested in: The Flower of the Cedar, by one of my students, Kay ben-Avraham. This is an audiobook podcast of Kay’s debut fantasy novel, performed by Kay herself. Some of you may have met Kay at Mythmoot or one of our other Signum gatherings, where she has read extracts from her novel – and therefore you already know how lovely a voice she has. For those who have not heard her read yet, you are in for a real treat. On top of that, the story is really engaging as well! The Flower of the Cedar is Signum University’s first foray into helping others publish their work, and I’m really excited for this to be the first thing that we help release into the world.

You can find the updated and new podcasts at the links above. You can also find other podcasts featuring myself and staff, faculty, and students of Signum over on the Signum University follow page and the Mythgard Listen page.