What military battle did J.R.R. Tolkien take part in during World War I?

J.R.R. Tolkien took part in the Battle of the Somme during World War I.

Tolkien served as a second lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers and arrived on the Western Front in 1916. He participated in the Somme offensive, one of the largest and bloodiest campaigns of the First World War. He later became ill with trench fever and was sent back to England.

The war affected Tolkien deeply, especially because many of his close friends from school and university were killed. His wartime experience is often discussed alongside the bleak landscapes and fellowship themes in his fiction, but Tolkien did not present Middle-earth as a simple coded account of the First World War. The Somme was a real historical campaign in France, not a fictional place.