Smith of Wootton Major

Every 24 years in the village of Wooton Major, the Feast of Good Children was held. To celebrate it a Great Cake was prepared, to feed the 24 children who were invited. The cake was very sweet and rich and entirely covered in sugar icing. But inside there were some very strange ingredients and whoever swallowed one of them would gain the gift of entry into the Land of Faery. 

What began as a preface to The Golden Key by George MacDonald eventually grew into this charming short story, so named by Tolkien to suggest an early work by P.G. Wodehouse. Composed almost a decade after The Lord of the Rings, and when his lifelong occupation with the Silmarillion was winding down, Smith of Wootton Major was the product of ripened experience and reflection and would be the last work of fiction to be published in Tolkien’s own lifetime.