“The Battle of Evermore” is a folk duet sung by Robert Plant and Sandy Denny, included on Led Zeppelin’s untitled 1971 album, commonly known as Led Zeppelin IV. The song was written by Jimmy Page and Robert Plant at Headley Grange while Page was experimenting on John Paul Jones’s mandolin. Page explained in 1977 that “‘Battle of Evermore’ was made up on the spot by Robert [Plant] and myself. I just picked up John Paul Jones’s mandolin, never having played a mandolin before, and just wrote up the chords and the whole thing in one sitting.”
The song, like Led Zeppelin’s “Ramble On” and “Misty Mountain Hop”, makes references to J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings, with “The Dark Lord rides in force tonight and time will tell us all” in line 4, “The drums will shake the castle wall, the Ringwraiths ride in black” in line 18, and mentions of war and swords (line 13), shooting with a bow (line 19), magic runes (line 20) and “the dragon of darkness” in line 24. The J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopaedia states that the three songs make “direct references to Gollum, Mordor, the Ringwraiths, and events described in The Silmarillion and [Lord of the Rings]“.
The Oxford Handbook of Music and Medievalism treats the song as “fantasy medievalism”, seeing allusions to multiple features of Tolkien’s Middle Earth, It notes that the song “specifically alludes” to the Dark Lord and the Ringwraiths, while the “Queen of Light” mentioned is “possibly” the elf-queen Galadriel. It states that the battle in the song “has often been identified by fans” as the Battle of the Pelennor Fields. Describing the effect of the song, it writes that Plant makes use of the feeling of nostalgia with the “strain and desperation” in his “vocal cries” combined with the “haunting, pastoral soundscape” that together set up “the destructive world of war in opposition to an idealised and Arcadian peaceful home”.
Plant felt he needed another voice to tell the story, and for the recording of the song, singer Sandy Denny was invited to duet with Plant. Denny was a former member of British folk rock group Fairport Convention, with whom Led Zeppelin had shared a bill in 1970 at the Bath Festival of Blues and Progressive Music. Plant played the role of the narrator and Denny represented the town crier. Page elaborated that “[The song] sounded like an old English instrumental first off. Then it became a vocal and Robert did his bit. Finally we figured we’d bring Sandy by and do a question-and-answer-type thing.”
To thank her for her involvement, Denny was given the symbol on the album sleeve of three pyramids (the four members of Led Zeppelin each chose their own symbols for the album). This is the only song Led Zeppelin ever recorded with a guest vocalist. In an interview he gave in 1995 to Uncut magazine, Plant stated that “For me to sing with Sandy Denny was great. We were always good friends with that period of Fairport Convention. Sandy and I were friends, and it was the most obvious thing to ask her to sing on ‘The Battle of Evermore’. If it suffered from naiveté and tweeness – I was only 23 – it makes up for it in the cohesion of the voices and the playing.”
