As a young graduate, Tolkien found himself transported from the ivory towers of Oxford to the bloody battlefields of the Somme. It was an experience that marked both him and his famous fiction.

Few who read Tolkien realise how close the author came to losing his life – as did so many young men of his generation, a great number of whom were also emerging writers, poets and artists – in the Somme. Visiting sites where the writer saw action can throw new light onto some of his stories and novels.

Tolkien was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers and trained in Staffordshire, lodging nearby with his new wife Edith. On 2nd June 1916 he was summoned to France by telegram.

“By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead,” he later wrote. Among them were Robert Gilson and Geoffrey Smith, who died in the assault on Beaumont Hamel, now the site of a peaceful memorial park and a rare network of preserved trenches.

Battlefield tours or self-drive itineraries can help visitors retrace Tolkien’s experiences. He took part in the attack on Ovillers – site of the Lochnagar mine crater – and saw action at Thiepval Wood, now home to a vast memorial to the missing. Astonishingly, he made revisions to his story Kortirion among the Trees in a dugout in the Thiepval frontline. After the capture of Regina Trench on 21–22 October, he fell sick and was sent to hospital then back to England.