J.R.R. Tolkien served in the Battle of the Somme in 1916.
During the First World War, Tolkien was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers. He served on the Western Front and took part in the Somme offensive, one of the war’s largest and most destructive campaigns. Tolkien became ill with trench fever and was sent back to England later in 1916.
The experience affected his generation deeply and is often discussed alongside the battle, loss, and landscapes that appear in his fiction. However, it is too simplistic to treat Middle-earth as a direct military memoir. Tolkien drew on many sources, including languages, medieval literature, mythology, personal experience, and imagination.
The Battle of the Somme began on 1 July 1916 and continued into November. Tolkien’s service is sometimes confused with the date he joined the army or with the year the war ended. The specific year associated with his Somme service is 1916.