Dion writes: I attended the Festival In The Shire this weekend as roving reporters for Scrolls, the podcast for literary geekdom. Whilst there I recorded interviews with Mark Faith (the creator of the festival), Rodney Matthews (artist), and Tom Shippey (author of JRR Tolkien: Author of the Century). If you and your readership are interested in hearing them you can do so at geeksyndicate.co.uk/podcasts. Click on the Scrolls link in the left hand column if it’s dropped off the main page.

Chapter 8: The Middle Earth Special, Part 1 contains the interviews. Part 2 will be recorded tonight and will be a discussion about LOTR with reference to the Festival, the book, movies and various other adaptations and – well, the conversation could take us in all kinds of directions so I suppose we’ll see how it goes.