Complex Numbers

Quoth the Singer, "Evermore."

Mostly, I'm just pleased that there exists a magazine called Far Out.

    Which war was Led Zeppelin’s ‘The Battle of Evermore’ about?  

Really, I didn't think this was much of a mystery.

Led Zeppelin’s fourth studio album might be most famous for the all-out hard rock of opening tracks ‘Black Dog’ and ‘Rock and Roll’, as well as the slow-burning firepower of ‘When the Levee Breaks’, and, of course, the ethereal majesty of ‘Stairway to Heaven’.

They apparently used up all their creative energy on the songs, because they never bothered to give the album a name. I guess, technically, the album name is Led Zeppelin, but most of us called it Zeppelin 4.

But ‘The Battle of Evermore’ is an underrated favourite for many fans, as well as the band’s singer Robert Plant.

It's absolutely near the top of my list.

It sounds as though ‘Evermore’ could suit a fictionalised or dramatised narrative of Agincourt or Bosworth Field, but that’s not what’s going on here. Zeppelin’s lyricist has taken his inspiration from the realm of pure fantasy, as compelling as that realm appears in this context.

That fantasy drew from reality, so it's not unreasonable to think that a real-life historical battle may have been the ultimate inspiration.

Plant didn’t just suck this legendary battle out of his thumb, however.

I'm just including that line here because I wish I'd come up with that particular turn of cliché.

He draws heavily on Tolkien’s high-fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings, including specific details in certain lines of the lyrics that indicate exactly which battle he’s referring to.

And somehow, I realized that even before I read Tolkien. Perhaps someone told me of the connection.

Lord of the Rings fans pinpoint Plant’s descriptions as a lyrical account of the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, which serves as the climactic battle in the War of the Ring during the third volume of the novel.

And that's a level of detail I'd never even considered exploring. Plant's lyrics on Zeppelin songs were always good examples of "This feels like it could be a metaphor, but for what?" It's probably more true for Stairway, which, incidentally, was the only song on the album with printed lyrics included, so I could only assume that there was something important there that he was trying to convey. I finally figured out what it was, decades later.

But Evermore was always pretty obvious: he was channeling Tolkien.

The legendary island of Avalon, the place where the sword Excalibur was forged in Arthurian legend, which also appears in the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, gets a mention, too. The frontman seems to have played around with mythical imagery without much care for its relation to any pre-existing narrative structure.

Okay, maybe not that obvious. Still, I thought the reference to Avalon in the song was mostly because it scanned well.

Normally, when I do an entry about a song, I'll include the video. But there's little need, as there's one at the linked article.