If we think things are bad today, we should cast ourselves back to this time a hundred years ago when Europe was sinking in the bloodbath of World War One. This is the centenary of the Battle of the Somme, in which almost 20,000 British soldiers lost their lives in a single day, going “over the top”, headlong into the German army’s deadly artillery. The 24-year-old Tolkien was a young officer in the trenches during this bloodiest of battles. Its impact on his imagination and on the future writing of The Lord of the Rings is illustrated in this excellent article in the New York Times: