At which 1916 battle did J.R.R. Tolkien serve as a signals officer?

J.R.R. Tolkien served as a signals officer during the Battle of the Somme in 1916.

Tolkien was commissioned into the Lancashire Fusiliers after completing his studies at Oxford. He went to France in June 1916 and took part in the Somme offensive, one of the largest and bloodiest campaigns of the First World War.

He served as a second lieutenant and worked with battalion signals, helping maintain communications in exceptionally difficult battlefield conditions. In October 1916, he became ill with trench fever and was sent back to England. He did not return to the front.

Tolkien’s wartime experiences influenced his imagination, although his fiction is not a simple autobiography. Readers often connect the dead marshes, ruined landscapes, and sense of fellowship under pressure with wartime experience, but Tolkien also drew deeply on mythology, language, history, and medieval literature.