Am I the only one that has this problem. I'm not getting updates from Itunes or a couple of other podcast apps I have. They worked up until "Exploring....." Episode 70.
The feeds have not been updated since the middle of August: latest EtLotR is, as you note, #70 and latest Malory is MSA023_20180822_A-Dolorous-Stroke-and-a-Momentous-Marriage.
It might have something to do with the new hosting. The old
http://media.signumuniversity.org/mythgardacademy/feed now redirects to
http://s3.amazonaws.com/media.podcast/feeds/MythgardAcademy.xml (for whatever reason: if there's been an announcement, I have missed it).
As far as the "XML gibberish" - this may be your browser. I find that Internet Explorer still displays the feed as a web page with links and descriptions, while Chrome displays the raw XML with the note at the top: "This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below."
Nevertheless, you can still find the latest linked file, at the BOTTOM end of the XML:
<item>
<title>Exploring Lord of the Rings: Episode 70</title>
<author>
[email protected] (Corey Olsen)</author>
<itunes:author>Corey Olsen</itunes:author>
<pubDate>Wed, 15 Aug 2018 13:39:11 +0000</pubDate>
<enclosure url="
http://media.podcast.s3.amazonaws.com/TolkienProf/TolkienProf439.mp3" length="85807274" type="audio/mpeg"/>
<guid isPermaLink="false">TolkienProf_439 </guid>
<itunes:duration>02:20:43</itunes:duration>
"); vertical-align: bottom; height: 10px;"><itunes:keywords>
Tolkien, Olsen, Mythgard, LOTRO, Silmarillion, Film
</itunes:keywords>
<description></description>
</item>
You can paste the red part into a browser's addressbar and it will start to play. In Chrome, there is a little down-arrow that lets you download the mp3 file.
And any podcast retrieval software should still understand the feed, no problem.
The problem is that the feed is not getting any updates!