How WWI Made Middle-earth

Tolkien fought in the Battle of the Somme. He never entirely left it.

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien enlisted in 1915, was deployed to France in 1916, and arrived at the Somme in time for one of the most catastrophic battles in human history.

In the first day of the Somme offensive alone, the British Army suffered nearly 60,000 casualties. Tolkien fought through the nightmare of it the mud, the noise, the unburied dead, the pa…