The movie series based on The Lord of the Rings brought to new prominence the author of the books on which it is based, J. R. R. Tolkien.  Tolkien was many things: a university professor, a medieval scholar, a writer of fantasy, and a Christian.  During the First World War, young Tolkien served in the trenches with the British army, and that experience is said to have had a major impact on his fiction.  During World War Two, while Britain struggled against the Axis powers, Tolkien, no longer young, wrote these words to his son Christopher:

"I sometimes feel appalled at the thought of the sum total of human misery all over the world at the present moment: the millions parted, fretting, wasting in unprofitable days quite apart from torture, pain, death, bereavement, injustice.  If anguish were visible, almost the whole of this benighted planet would be enveloped in a dense dark vapor, shrouded from the amazed vision of the heavens!  And the products of it all will be mainly evil historically considered.  But the historic vision is, of course, not the only one.  All things and all deeds have a value in themselves, apart from their 'causes' and 'effects.'  No man can estimate what is really happening in the light of eternity.  All we do know, and that to a large extent by direct experience, is that evil labors with vast power and perpetual success in vain: preparing the soil for unexpected good to spout in." [I have substituted "in the light of eternity' for Tolkien's Latin phrase sub species aeternitatis.]

Tolkien describes the powerful, successful work of evil as amounting to a preparation of soil, a preparation of soil where unexpected good will sprout. Tolkien talks about soil. Jesus talks about seed. From a solitary seed, Jesus tells us, much fruit will come forth. Unexpected good will sprout.