At least in the opinion of casual listeners and the cumulative swell of music critics down the years, ‘Stairway to Heaven’ is Led Zeppelin’s definitive contribution to music. The jewel in the crown of symphonic rock that builds from Jimmy Page’s unmistakable opening acoustic riff into a blaze of celestial glory, the song is a staple piece for guitarists everywhere.
Over the music, Robert Plant delivers his most delicately refined vocal performance, spinning a yarn about a journey beyond. Plant stumbled upon his lyrics for the song, describing in a 1977 interview how his “hand was writing out the words” to the first couplet before he seemed to know what was happening. “I just sat there and looked at them and almost leapt out of my seat”.
The words he’d written referred to “a lady who’s sure all that glitters is gold”. This lady’s journey is the subject of the song’s first verse, and she returns late in the song’s penultimate segment when Plant addresses her directly. As the track reaches its spectacular crescendo, he tells us she’s “a lady we all know”.
And yet, over 50 years after the song was released on the band’s seminal album Led Zeppelin IV, we still don’t actually know the real identity of the mystery lady in the song. Or do we? Maybe Plant can give us a clue.
Is she real or fictional?
Zeppelin’s singer and lyricist would go on to describe the subject of the song as just “some cynical aside about a woman getting everything she wanted all the time without giving back any thought or consideration”. He specifies a “cynical sweep of the hand” in the opening lines, alluding to the apparent bribery and corruption involved in the lady “buying” her way into heaven. “It softened up after that,” Plant adds, which is evident in pastoral images of bustling “hedgerows” and “forests” echoing “with laughter” later in the song.
His description of composing the lyrics with “sweep of the hand” doesn’t suggest any real person Plant had encountered who was worth writing home about. His inspiration for the lady buying a stairway to heaven appears to be abstract, or at the very least imagined.
Plant was known to have a keen interest in Celtic and Norse mythology, as well as being an admirer of high-fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings. Indeed, he has admitted to “talking about CS Lewis and Tolkien”, the novel’s author, elsewhere on Led Zeppelin IV.
As such, there’s a Zeppelin fan theory that the “lady” in ‘Stairway to Heaven’ is actually Tolkien’s half-elven character Arwen, who was portrayed by Liv Tyler in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings film trilogy. They point to various lines in the song’s lyrics, which appear to be cryptic references to Arwen’s story, such as her “spirit is crying for leaving” when torn between going with the elves or staying with the mortals.
“There are two paths you can go by,” Plant tells her, perhaps in reference to the journey undertaken in the novel. “The piper’s calling you to join him,” he continues, apparently referring to the pipe-smoking wizard Gandalf.
This interpretation of the song is quite a stretch, and its adherents seem to know more about Plant’s unconscious mind at the time of writing ‘Stairway to Heaven’ than he does. But at least it gives us an answer as to the identity of the mystery lady.