The Battle of the Somme partly inspired J.R.R. Tolkien’s description of the Dead Marshes.
Tolkien served in the British Army during the First World War and experienced the Battle of the Somme in 1916. He was a second lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers and worked as a signals officer. The battle’s mud, devastation, corpses, and terrible human cost stayed with him long after the war.
The Dead Marshes in The Lord of the Rings are a landscape of stagnant pools and lights, where faces of the dead appear beneath the water. Tolkien did not present the region as a literal memoir of the Somme, but his wartime experience contributed to its atmosphere and imagery. He also drew on broader memories of trench warfare and industrialized destruction.
Tolkien left the front after becoming ill with trench fever in October 1916. The Somme was fought from 1 July to 18 November 1916 and caused enormous casualties on all sides. Connecting the Dead Marshes only to one exact location oversimplifies the mixture of memory and invention in the scene.