UPDATE: I've changed the video
"The Battle of Evermore" has always been my favorite Led Zeppelin tune, has been since high school. In a nice bit of synchronicity a decade later I became interested in Celtic music and discovered the Fairport Convention/Steeleye Span school of folk rock. I became a big fan of Sandy Denny. A bit later I realized that the female voice on "The Battle of Evermore" was Sandy Denny. Sandy, is sadly no longer with us, but I was thinking about the current Robert Plant/Alison Krauss tour, and realized that Alison's voice would be quite good in "The Battle". It turns out that I am not the only that thinks so.
A lot has been made about the Tolkien references in Led Zeppelin. There are many videos combining footage from the LotR movies with this song. The Battle of Pellanor Fields is quite popular. There are websites that try to interpret Zeppelin songs as restatements of the story line of Lord of the Rings. These interpretations all seem forced to me. I think that Page and Plant used Tolkien as one of many sources for imagery, but that they were not explicitly writing songs about any particular mythos. The ring wraiths in black in the song are balanced by the non-Tolkienian Angels of Avalon. Everyone in the song is waiting for the Eastern Glow, that is the Dawn. In Tolkien the Eastern Glow was the fire of Mordor and something to feared or endured, not awaited. In the books when the glow of the sun did arrive it came from the West as the sun set below the darkness, or from the South, when the wind from the sea blew away the mirk of Mordor. (One of the few times in the LotR when you could claim that the Valar took an active role). These are brilliant songs, and they use the imagery created by Tolkien very well, much in the same way that earlier poets used the imagery of Classical mythology to paint images. An English band using the imagery from the Lord of the Rings to weave together songs comes close to to what Tolkien was aiming at when he wrote the Lord of the Rings, which was to create a English mythology.
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2 comments:
While, yes, they are trying to write music that would reflect the English mythic archetype, it's a little more complex than that. Both the Angels of Avalon and the Eastern Glow are references to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Plant's some what long fascination and involvement with some aspects of the Western Esoteric tradition make this surely a source for a lot of Led Zeppelin's music, much less, say, the fact that there isn't a name for Led Zep IV
Of course this would be the time for my traditional thing about Led Zeppelin. I was at their last full concert. Bohnam collapsed on stage at the one in Nuremberg the next day, and he wasn't the drummer at their final show in Berlin.
Of course, I don't really count the LiveAid thing with Phil Collins on drums or any of the 21st centry one off re-union shows either, even if they do have a Bohnam on drums.
I think that we agree, then that neither, this song, nor any the other "Tolkien" Led Zeppelin songs ("Ramble On", etc.) are "about" the Lord of the Rings, then. Neither are they purely about the Western Esoteric Tradition. They were taking bits and pieces and weaving their own images.
Braggart.
I hope you listened to the Plant/Krauss rendition.
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