What was the name of Tolkien’s World War I battalion at the Battle of the Somme?

J.R.R. Tolkien served with the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers at the Battle of the Somme.

After graduating from Oxford and receiving military training, Tolkien was commissioned as a temporary second lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers during the First World War. He joined the 11th Service Battalion and went to France in 1916.

The battalion took part in the Somme offensive, one of the war’s largest and bloodiest campaigns. Tolkien served as a signals officer and experienced the conditions of trench warfare before falling ill with trench fever. He was sent back to England for treatment and did not return to active service in France.

Many of his close school friends were killed in the war. Scholars often discuss the war’s influence on Tolkien’s later writing, but specific one-to-one identifications between real battles and fictional events remain interpretations rather than stated facts.