Which World War I battle did J.R.R. Tolkien survive while serving with the Lancashire Fusiliers?

J.R.R. Tolkien survived the Battle of the Somme while serving with the Lancashire Fusiliers.

Tolkien was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers during the First World War. He served on the Western Front and took part in the Somme offensive in 1916. After developing trench fever, he was sent back to England for recovery and did not return to active front-line service.

The experience profoundly affected Tolkien’s generation and later readers have often connected the landscapes, military dangers, and losses in his fiction with the First World War. Tolkien himself resisted simple one-to-one interpretations of Middle-earth, so the connection should be treated as influence and context rather than a direct conversion of particular battles into scenes.

The Somme is sometimes confused with Passchendaele because both were major Western Front battles involving British forces. Tolkien’s documented wartime service places him at the Somme in 1916.