Which World War I battle did J.R.R. Tolkien survive in 1916?

J.R.R. Tolkien survived the Battle of the Somme in 1916.

Tolkien served as a second lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers during the First World War. He went to France in June 1916 and took part in the Somme offensive, one of the conflict’s largest and bloodiest campaigns. He became ill with trench fever in October and was sent back to England.

The Somme experience affected Tolkien deeply. Many of his close school friends were killed during the war, and the themes of loss, comradeship, endurance, and devastated landscapes can be felt in later Middle-earth writing. The connection should not be reduced to a direct one-to-one allegory: Tolkien repeatedly resisted treating his fiction as a simple coded account of modern events.

The Battle of the Somme began on 1 July 1916 and continued until November. Tolkien’s illness prevented him from returning to the front.