In which battle was J.R.R. Tolkien serving when he became ill during World War I?

J.R.R. Tolkien was serving during the Battle of the Somme when he became ill in World War I.

Tolkien served as a second lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers and went to France in 1916. He took part in the Battle of the Somme, one of the war’s largest and bloodiest campaigns, which began on 1 July 1916. Tolkien later developed trench fever and was sent back to England for treatment.

His illness ended his active service in France, although he remained in the British Army for the rest of the war in various duties. Many of his close school friends from King Edward’s School were killed in the conflict, a personal loss that influenced his reflections on friendship, sacrifice and war.

It is too simplistic to identify one fictional battle as a direct retelling of the Somme. Tolkien rejected straightforward one-to-one allegorical readings of The Lord of the Rings, but scholars and biographers have discussed how his wartime experience informed its atmosphere and themes.