Tolkien and the Somme· built byUuser-e8a0f3

Tolkien and the Somme 3

• 1892 – 1973 J.R.R. Tolkien John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (3 January 1892 – 2 September 1973) was an English author, philologist and academic whose creation of Middle-earth — its languages, histories, myths and peoples — constitutes one of the most sustained acts of world-building in literary history. A professor of Anglo-Saxon and later English Language and Literature at Oxford, Tolkien spent forty years constructing a mythology he called 'a mythology for England,' rooted in Old English, Norse and Finnish literary traditions. The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954–55) transformed fantasy literature and have sold over 600 million copies combined. He died before completing The Silmarillion, which his son Christopher edited and published posthumously in 1977.
• 1916 World War I — the Battle of the Somme Tolkien serves as a signals officer with the 11th Battalion, Lancashire Fusiliers and arrives in France in June 1916, just in time for the Battle of the Somme — one of the bloodiest battles in military history. He fights at the Somme through the summer of 1916. His two closest TCBS friends — Robert Gilson, killed 1 July 1916 (the first day of the Somme), and Geoffrey Bache Smith, who dies of wounds in December 1916 — are among the 420,000 British casualties. Tolkien contracts trench fever in October 1916 and is invalided home. He begins writing 'The Fall of Gondolin' in a military hospital.
• 1916 The Battle of the Somme Somme, France On the first day the British Army took 57,470 casualties, 19,240 of them dead — the worst day in its history. The battle ran for 141 days and moved the line about six miles.