Find hillmen

Those are raid bosses, I believe, for level 50 content 24-man raids.

You can also buy those items off of Skirmish Vendors (Curiousity, I think), which was the easiest way for me. They're expensive, but worth it.

Like DDO, Turbine's other MMO, in order to skip the tutorial, you have to get at least one character through it first. After you've gotten at least one completely through it, when you go to create another new character and are prompted to fill in your name, you'll see a checkbox in the lower right above the Create button that says "Skip New User Tutorial." Check that box and your character will be able to enter the post-tutorial version of your race's starting area.

Unfortunately, as far as I know, there's no way to skip the newbie-only part of the beginning areas. Your friends will be stuck running through there for the first 5 or so levels. If you yourself have run a few characters through enough times that you know an efficient path, it may be handy for you to just roll a newbie to run with them and blaze through the quests.

As a note, if you delete the character you ran through the tutorial with, your account remains "flagged" as having the tutorial completed, so you can still use the checkbox to skip it then.