In which army unit did J.R.R. Tolkien serve during the First World War?

J.R.R. Tolkien served in the Lancashire Fusiliers during the First World War.

Tolkien received a commission as a second lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers in 1915. He was sent to France in 1916 and served during the Battle of the Somme, one of the war’s largest and most destructive campaigns.

He later contracted trench fever and was returned to England for treatment. Tolkien spent much of the rest of the war in England, where he began developing stories and languages that contributed to his mythology.

The war influenced Tolkien’s imagination, but it is too simplistic to treat Middle-earth as a direct retelling of the conflict. Tolkien repeatedly resisted one-to-one allegorical readings of his fiction, even though his experiences informed its themes of loss, endurance, and fellowship.