When you start your journey around Middle Earth, you will be on foot. This is generally fine for the initial quests you will be doing in the LOTRO introduction (quests that will get you up to about level 7 or so), but as you start journeying further afield, you may wish that you could travel around the world faster, which often means going by horseback.
To ride a horse around Middle Earth, you generally need both the Riding Skill and an actual horse to ride.
As I mentioned in the FAQ article on LOTRO currencies, LOTRO is a free-to-play ("F2P") game, and you can obtain both the riding skill and a horse solely by doing in-game activity (to earn Turbine Points for the first, and silver or festival tokens for the second). However, there are some ways of getting these items either directly or indirectly for cash, and those will be discussed as well.
Riding Skill
If you are a VIP player (someone who pays a subscription fee to play LOTRO by the month, quarter or year), you can do a certain quest once your character reaches level 20 that will give you the Riding Skill as a reward.
If you are not a VIP player (or don’t want to wait till get to level 20), you can get the Riding Skill at the LOTRO store for 95 Turbine Points once your character reaches level 5. If you expect to be using more than one character on your account, you can get the Apprentice Riding Trait package (1995 Turbine Points) or the Journeyman Riding Trait package (2995 Turbine Points) from the LOTRO store, and these will give the Riding Skill to all characters on a particular account. The Journeyman Riding Trait makes your horse a bit faster than the Apprentice Riding Trait. Sometimes these packages go on sale, making them a bit cheaper.
Here is a link in the wiki that adds a few details.
Getting A Horse
The simplest way to get a horse is to go up to Hengstacer’s Farm north of Bree town and buy one for 500 silver or so. You can also get horses in exchange for festival tokens at various LOTRO festivals, in gift boxes, and various other means.
Here is a link to the wiki article that discusses horses (there are other things you can ride besides horses, but not at the early levels of the game).
Temporary Horse
Once you finish the introduction quests, you get a gift box that contains a Wrapped Horse Whistle item. Basically it gives you a horse for 24 hours, so time your use of it wisely!
You do not need the Riding Skill to use this temporary horse.
The Sam Gamgee Starter Pack
You can buy the Sam Gamgee Starter Pack at the LOTRO store for (currently) $4.99 US. This gives the Riding Skill and a horse to each character on your account (so this is a useful option for people that plan to create more than one character). It also gives you an extra inventory bag to carry stuff around during your travels, as well as some other stuff that doesn’t relate to travel. Here is a link that describes this in more detail.
From time to time, there are special offers for various other LOTRO starter packs, from companies other than Turbine. These often include a horse! You can search on the term free LOTRO starter pack in your favorite internet search engine from time to time to see if there is any current offers of this sort.
Swift Travel
Using a horse as described in the preceding sections requires you to manually guide your four-legged friend across the terrain of Middle Earth. However, there are some ways to travel around Middle Earth almost instantaneously, which I will discuss below:
Stable-masters. You can travel quickly among the various Stable-master locations in Middle Earth. Whenever you see a Stable-master NPC who you have not encountered before, you should always interact with him (right click on him), and you can see what places you can travel to from his stable. However, there are two types of routes that are available. If a route is marked ‘swift travel,’ then you do indeed move almost instantaneously (you only see the start and the end of the journey on the screen). If the route is NOT marked as ‘swift travel’, then you will have to watch the entire journey unfold furlong by furlong as if you were manually guiding your horse (though the journey is hands-free from your standpoint) – still this can be useful if you want to multi-task while travelling, or if you don’t know the exact route you need to follow to get there on your own.
Another issue is that the number of stable-master routes is mostly limited to travel between starter areas if you are not a VIP player.
Here is link to the wiki topic on Stable-masters, which also describes some other quick ways of getting around … many of those ‘other ways’ are not very applicable to low-level characters, but there are a couple methods that are: milestones and travel to houses, which I will discuss next….
Milestone Travel. When you complete the prologue quests, you will get your first milestone. You can use this milestone skill to immediately return to that particular location. You can also buy additional milestone locations at the LOTRO store. When you encounter new milestones during your travels, you can reset any milestone you currently own to that new milestone, so that you can return to that new milestone instead of the previous one.
Travel to kinhouse or personal house. Once you join a kinship, you will get a skill that allows you to immediately travel to the kinhouse. Once you buy a personal house (you have to be level 15 to do this) you get an additional skill that allows you to return there as well.