MIDDLE-EARTH TIMELINE
In the village of Wootton Major, a Great Cake is baked every twenty four years for the Feast of Good Children. One year a small boy swallows the fairy star hidden in it without knowing. The star shines on his brow when he grows up to be the village smith, and it lets him walk into Faery, a perilous land of wonder, until the day he must give it up.
Smith of Wootton Major was the last story Tolkien published in his lifetime. It began as a preface to George MacDonald's The Golden Key and grew into a tale of its own. George Allen and Unwin published it in 1967 with illustrations by Pauline Baynes.
A boy swallows a fairy star hidden in a cake and, as the village smith, is allowed to wander in the land of Faery.