What was J.R.R. Tolkien’s military unit during the Battle of the Somme in 1916?

J.R.R. Tolkien served with the 11th Battalion, Lancashire Fusiliers during the Battle of the Somme in 1916.

Tolkien was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers during the First World War. He served on the Somme and took part in the Battle of Thiepval Ridge, where the battalion suffered severe casualties.

He later developed trench fever and was sent back to England for treatment. His wartime experience affected his life and has often been discussed alongside themes of friendship, loss, endurance, and landscapes of destruction in his fiction.

It is too simple to claim that one character or event in Middle-earth directly represents one wartime counterpart. Tolkien resisted straightforward allegorical readings. Still, the war formed part of the historical experience from which he drew emotional knowledge and memories while creating his mythology.