Jared, Oriana and Ned talk about Ned’s choice of topic: Smith of Wootton Major. A short non-Middle-Earth novella published in 1967 and illustrated by Pauline Baynes, Smith is a kind of a fairy tale literally about Faery, a realm which only certain people can visit. Smith, indeed a blacksmith from a sort-of medieval English town called Wootton Major, is one of those people, having received a magical silver star in his youth as part of a major ceremony based around the town’s Great Hall and its function as a place for fabulous feasts. But while Smith alternates his adult life between work, home and hearth and the visits to Faery he is able now to do, eventually there comes a time when he needs to face the necessary decision to surrender the star for a newer generation. Inspired by his unfinished preface about George MacDonald’s “The Golden Key,” Smith was the last work Tolkien published in his lifetime, a quietly entrancing story about artistry, time and the power of imagination. What do the many then-unpublished papers and background material about the story which emerged in later years say both about Smith itself and Tolkien’s work as a whole? What does the function of religion—or rather, how it is not directly portrayed in the story at all—have in both the story and in Tolkien’s argument for how it should be interpreted? What are the potential touchstones for his portrayal of the realm of Faery and the Elves who live there, who are in many ways very different from his Middle-earth Elves? And what makes the Master Cook Nokes such a satisfying antagonist—but not, as the story itself is at pains to note, an irredeemable villain?