The Battle of the Somme

July–November 1916 — Tolkien as signals officer, and the landscape of Mordor

Other names

Somme

ca. 1 min

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In briefanswer capsule

Second Lieutenant Tolkien of the Lancashire Fusiliers reached the Somme in June 1916 and went into the line at the beginning of July. He served as battalion signals officer through the fighting for Ovillers and the Schwaben Redoubt until trench fever sent him home in November; two of his three closest school friends were dead by the end of the year. He refused to let the war be read as the story's meaning, but he allowed it into the landscape: the Dead Marshes and the approaches to the Morannon, he wrote, owe something to Northern France after the Somme. The first legend, The Fall of Gondolin, was written in hospital afterwards.

The Battle of the Somme, 1916Men of the 11th Battalion, Cheshire Regiment, in a captured trench near Ovillers, July 1916. Tolkien was there the same summer as signals officer with the Lancashire Fusiliers.© John Warwick Brooke · Public domain

Thiepval Memorial, SommeThe memorial names the missing of the 1916 Somme battles — the months in which Tolkien's battalion served.© Rolf Kranz · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Lizenz

What became of it

Mordor
The landscape only, Tolkien insisted — but that much he granted: the Dead Marshes and the road to the Black Gate owe something to Northern France after the Somme.
- The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien — Letter 226The Dead Marshes and the approaches to the Morannon owe something to Northern France after the Battle of the Somme.
Fall of Gondolin
The first of the legends to be written down, in hospital and on leave after the Somme: a city besieged and overrun by machines and monsters.
- The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien — Letter 165written in hospital and on leave after surviving the Battle of the Somme in 1916
Samwise Gamgee
Carpenter records Tolkien saying that Sam was a reflexion of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen he had known in 1914 and found so superior to himself.
- J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography — Part Three, ch. 5, Northmoor Road
- Tolkien and the Great War — Postscript

Sources

The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien — Letter 226
The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien — Letter 165
Tolkien and the Great War — Part Two

Cite this page

Legendarium (2026): „The Battle of the Somme“. Last updated September 3, 2026. https://www.legendarium.page/tolkien/somme/

APA

Legendarium. (2026). The Battle of the Somme. Last updated September 3, 2026. https://www.legendarium.page/tolkien/somme/

MLA

„The Battle of the Somme“. Legendarium, 2026, https://www.legendarium.page/tolkien/somme/. Last updated September 3, 2026.

BibTeX

@misc{legendarium-somme-en,
  title        = {The Battle of the Somme},
  author       = {{Legendarium}},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://www.legendarium.page/tolkien/somme/}},
  note         = {Last updated September 3, 2026}
}