Why did Tolkien and Lewis, ignoring the most powerful trends of their culture, embark on this task? Part of the answer lies in the battlefields of France. It was there, as young soldiers, that they encountered these virtues—in the officers and privates and medics at the Western Front. It was there, according to Tolkien, that the inspiration for his most beloved mythic character occurred. The exploits of the hobbits reveal how the “unforeseen and unforeseeable acts of will, and deeds of virtue of the apparently small, ungreat, forgotten in the places of the Wise and Great” shaped the destinies
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