What was the name of J.R.R. Tolkien’s wartime army battalion in World War I?

J.R.R. Tolkien served in the 11th Battalion, Lancashire Fusiliers, during World War I.

Tolkien was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers and served with the battalion on the Western Front in 1916. He took part in the Battle of the Somme, one of the war’s largest and bloodiest campaigns.

He later became ill with trench fever and was sent back to England. Most of the officers in his battalion were killed at the Somme, a loss that deeply affected him and contributed to the wartime background often noticed in his later writing.

Tolkien’s fiction should not be reduced to a direct allegory of World War I, and he rejected simple one-to-one interpretations. Nevertheless, his experience of war, loss, comradeship, and devastated landscapes formed an important part of his life and imaginative context.