Which World War I battle inspired J.R.R. Tolkien’s experience of war while serving in the British Army?

The Battle of the Somme shaped J.R.R. Tolkien’s experience of World War I while he served in the British Army.

Tolkien was commissioned into the Lancashire Fusiliers in 1915 and served as a signals officer. He took part in the Somme offensive in 1916, one of the largest and bloodiest campaigns of the First World War. He later became ill with trench fever and was sent back to England.

Tolkien did not present Middle-earth as a simple one-to-one allegory of the war. He resisted attempts to map every character or event directly onto real people and history. Nevertheless, his wartime experiences, the loss of close friends, and his memories of industrialized destruction informed the emotional atmosphere of his fiction.

The Battle of Verdun and Passchendaele were also major First World War battles, which makes them plausible mix-ups. Tolkien’s documented active service in 1916 was at the Somme, not at those campaigns.