When Small Hands Carry the Light

During the darkest years of World War II, while German bombs fell on British cities and the outcome of civilization hung in the balance, an Oxford professor named J. R. R. Tolkien sat writing by lamplight. Through the war years of 1939 to 1945 and nearly a decade beyond, this quiet philologist labored over a story in which the smallest, most unassuming creatures in an imagined world were entrusted with defeating its greatest evil.…