In 1916, a twenty-four year-old British soldier arrived at the Battle of the Somme, where over a million men were killed or wounded  over just five miles of ground. John Ronald Reuel (J.R.R) Tolkien lost two of his closest friends in the battle, an experience of indiscriminate slaughter that stayed with him for the rest of his life. Echoes of the First World War can be found throughout Tolkien’s later literary work,  most famously in The Lord of the Rings - from the corpse-st