Beginning with the barreling declaration "We come from the land of Ice and snow, " Robert Plant and Jimmy Page wrote this song in 1970 when they were in Reykjavik at the invitation of the Icelandic government. Plant explained that a blue-collar strike threatened to cancel the gig. "So the university… prepared the concert hall …for us to play and it was most phenomenal... " Six days later, Led Zeppelin debuted the song at a festival in Bath, UK. Of the lyric, Plant said, "We went to Iceland, and it made you think of Vikings and big ships and John Bonham's stomach and, bang, there it was — 'Immigrant Song.'" A noted tidbit: "hammer of the gods" is from this lyric.