With its iconic opening shrieks over a driving rhythm of guitar, bass, and drums in unison, ‘Immigrant Song’ is a Led Zeppelin track with instant appeal like few others. It throws the listener headlong into the band’s third album, with tales of “Valhalla” and the “tides of war” told at a frenetic pace.
As he later told The Guardian, guitarist Jimmy Page felt the “hypnotic riff” and vocalist Robert Plant’s “bloodcurdling scream” during the song’s opening seconds would be the perfect way to start an LP. And a live show, it seemed.
Zeppelin debuted the song almost as soon as they’d written it at the Bath Festival of Blues and Progressive Music at the end of June 1970. It opened their subsequent gigs during a tour of Germany and immediately became a fan favourite. Their reference to the “hammer of the gods” became a metaphor for Page’s guitar sound and metal music itself, inspiring countless other bands to swing the hammer in search of sonic lightning.
But what exactly, or where exactly, is vocalist Robert Plant singing about? And how did the group come up with the song’s title, which feels at odds with its mythological lyrics at first glance?
The many allusions to folk legend in ‘Immigrant Song’ do have a particular cultural basis in Norse and Viking mythology. Robert Plant wrote the song’s lyrics after being inspired by the history of Viking immigration to Britain a millennium ago.
Led Zeppelin were visiting Iceland for a performance at the Laugardalshöll exhibition centre in Reykjavík on June 22nd 1970, and their singer went to visit the Viking artefacts preserved in the country. “You can’t be anything else but moved by the place,” he reflected, mentioning how he saw the “huge boats” the Vikings used to travel across the Atlantic.
It was these journeys in particular that amazed Plant. “Wow! These guys came from here to Stranraer?” he thought at the time. From there, he decided to write a song about being a Viking immigrant, incorporating imagery from Norse myths and what he saw in Iceland. Hence lines in the song refer to “ice and snow”, “midnight sun” and “hot springs”.
Plant’s visual renderings of Iceland and its Viking heritage would come to play a central role in Led Zeppelin’s own mythologisation, as well as the folklore of metal music as a whole. The singer has returned to the island “a couple of times” since that first visit, and met with one of Iceland’s prime ministers.
“I was in that room!” he told Plant, referring to the original gig which inspired the song. He and 5,000 others witnessed history, before the four band members returned to the western shore, with their new song in tow.
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