16. He fought in WW1, and was at the Battle of the Somme
Though he spent much of his life safely cloistered in the ancient colleges of Oxford, Tolkien bravely enlisted to fight in World War I. Aged just 22 and fresh out of his undergraduate degree, Tolkien was made a second lieutenant in the 13th Service Battalion of the Lancashire Fusilliers. He trained in signaling in Staffordshire and Yorkshire, and was shipped over to France in June 1916, barely 3 months after marrying his beloved Edith. He didn’t mince his words when describing what that felt like: ‘It was like a death’. And that was before he knew what horrors awaited him…
Tolkien fought at the Battle of the Somme in July 1916, where over a million people died over 141 days of fighting. That October however he contracted trench fever, and spent the rest of the war deemed unfit for service in various English hospitals. It was during this convalescence that he first wrote about Middle Earth. The first dragons he wrote about were slow-moving, clanking beasts with orcs hidden inside them, much like the tanks at the Somme. The character of the brave, loyal, but essentially ordinary Samwise Gamgee is also based on Tolkien’s impressions of his fellow soldiers.
