page_title: J. R. R. Tolkien
section_title: Battle of the Somme
hierarchical_section_title: J. R. R. Tolkien / Biography / First World War / Battle of the Somme
caption_attribution_description: IWM caption&#160;: Battle of Albert&#160;: Soldiers of the 1st Battalion, The Lancashire Fusiliers fixing bayonets prior to the attack on Beaumont Hamel. They are wearing ‘fighting order’, with the haversack in place of the pack, and with the rolled groundsheet strapped to the belt below the mess-tin which contained rations. The officer in the foreground (right) is wearing other ranks’ uniform to be less conspicuous. Comment&#160;: Trench sign indicates 'King St'
context_page_description: John Ronald Reuel Tolkien CBE FRSL was an English writer, poet, philologist, and academic. He was the author of the high fantasy works The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
  He served as the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon and Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford, from 1925 to 1945 and Merton Professor of English Language and Literature and Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, from 1945 to 1959. He was at one time a close friend of C. S. Lewis—they were both members of the informal literary discussion group known as the Inklings. Tolkien was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II on 28 March 1972.
  After Tolkien's death, his son Christopher published a series of works based on his father's extensive notes and unpublished manuscripts, including The Silmarillion. These, together with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, form a connected body of tales, poems, fictional histories, invented languages, and literary essays about a fantasy world called Arda and Middle-earth within it. Between 1951 and 1955, Tolkien applied the term legendarium to the larger part of these writings.
context_section_description: Tolkien arrived at the Somme in early July 1916. In between terms behind the lines at Bouzincourt, he participated in the assaults on the Schwaben Redoubt and the Leipzig salient. Tolkien's time in combat was a terrible stress for Edith, who feared that every knock on the door might carry news of her husband's death. Edith could track her husband's movements on a map of the Western Front.The Reverend Mervyn S. Evers, Anglican chaplain to the Lancashire Fusiliers, recorded that Tolkien and his brother officers were eaten by "hordes of lice" which found the Medical Officer's ointment merely "a kind of hors d'oeuvre and the little beggars went at their feast with renewed vigour."
  On 27 October 1916, as his battalion attacked Regina Trench, Tolkien contracted trench fever, a disease carried by the lice. He was invalided to England on 8 November 1916. Many of his dearest school friends were killed in the war. Among their number were Rob Gilson of the Tea Club and Barrovian Society, who was killed on the first day of the Somme while leading his men in the assault on Beaumont Hamel. Fellow T.C.B.S. member Geoffrey Smith was killed during the same battle when a German artillery shell landed on a first aid post. Tolkien's battalion was almost completely wiped out following his return to England.
  According to John Garth, Kitchener's army at once marked existing social boundaries and counteracted the class system by throwing everyone into a desperate situation together. Tolkien was grateful, writing that it had taught him, "a deep sympathy and feeling for the Tommy; especially the plain soldier from the agricultural counties".
  In later years, Tolkien indignantly declared that those who searched his works for parallels to the Second World War were entirely mistaken:
  One has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as the years go by it seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead.
caption: Men of the 1st Battalion, Lancashire Fusiliers in a communication trench near Beaumont Hamel, 1916. Photo by Ernest Brooks
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