Which World War I battle did J.R.R. Tolkien experience as a signals officer?

J.R.R. Tolkien experienced the Battle of the Somme as a signals officer in the British Army.

After graduating from Oxford, Tolkien was commissioned into the Lancashire Fusiliers during the First World War. He served on the Western Front in 1916 and took part in the Somme offensive. His duties involved battlefield communications, a dangerous role that required him to work near the front lines.

Tolkien became ill with trench fever and was sent back to England in October 1916. The illness prevented his return to active service. Most of the officers in his battalion were later killed, and the experience left a lasting mark on him, although he resisted simple one-to-one interpretations of Middle-earth as a war allegory.

The Somme is often connected with Tolkien’s wartime generation, but his fiction also draws on medieval literature, invented languages, Catholic ideas, landscape, and personal friendship. The battle is therefore important biographically without serving as a complete explanation for his mythology.