Which military conflict did J.R.R. Tolkien serve in as a British Army officer?

J.R.R. Tolkien served in the First World War as a British Army officer.

After graduating from Oxford, Tolkien was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers. He served on the Western Front and took part in the Battle of the Somme in 1916. He later became ill with trench fever and was sent back to England.

The war had a lasting effect on Tolkien. Many of his close school friends were killed, and the experience influenced the emotional atmosphere of his later writing. However, it is too simple to identify particular characters or events as direct one-to-one portraits of the war. Tolkien repeatedly resisted overly literal interpretations of his fiction.

A frequent confusion is the Second World War, because The Lord of the Rings was written and published during and after that period. Tolkien’s own military service took place in the First World War, decades earlier.