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Nornagest comments on The Importance of Sidekicks - LessWrong
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Gandalf, yes -- he does say that that the point of his existence was to be the counter to to Sauron -- but Aragorn, no. He was a ranger before and became a king after, with just six months of heroism in between.
Gandalf's essentially an angel, so I'm not sure concepts like dedicating one's life to something conventionally apply to him. But "ranger", for Aragorn, seems to cover an awful lot of heroism -- and I wouldn't be surprised if "king" did as well.
Being a hero in epic fantasy is often less about what you do and more about what you are. Lord of the Rings handles that in an interesting way, by arranging events such that the fate of the world hinges on the actions of characters who're decidedly unheroic by genre standards -- antiheroes in the classical, not the grimdark, sense of the word -- but it plays the mantle-of-destiny thing more or less straight if we're talking about anyone who isn't a hobbit.
Well, a Maia, and while I think his life was dedicated to a particular cause, there are enough hints that it's not Gandalf himself who did the dedicating :-/ Though he certainly seemed to be perfectly fine with that.
I don't think so -- the hobbits are not "anti", they are unexpected heroes, but pretty straight heroes otherwise.