 The use of Viking themes and imagery in hard rock and heavy metal music predates the advent of Viking metal . For instance , the lyrics to Led Zeppelin 's " Immigrant Song " ( 1970 ) and " No Quarter " ( 1973 ) feature allusions to Viking voyages , violence , and exploration . The Swedish band Heavy Load often wrote Viking @-@ themed songs , such as the 1978 song " Son of the Northern Light " , and Eduardo Rivadavia of AllMusic writes that the 1983 song " Stronger than Evil " establishes a case for Heavy Load as the first Viking metal group . Swedish neoclassical metal guitarist Yngwie Malmsteen sometimes featured themes of hyper @-@ masculinity , heroic warriors , and Vikings ; for example , on his 1985 album Marching Out . The German band Grave Digger and American band Manowar , both of which formed in 1980 , drew upon Norse myth as envisioned in Richard Wagner 's Der Ring des Nibelungen . Manowar in particular adopted Viking imagery much more heavily than other bands . Trafford and Pluskowski write that Manowar , " champions of the furry loincloth " , " were widely ridiculed even within heavy metal , but won a sizeable — and fanatical — following . " However , Trafford and Pluskowski stipulate that while Manowar adopted Viking imagery , it did not embrace it . They explain that " in any case , the Manowar version of the Vikings owes as much to Conan the Barbarian as it does to history , saga , or Edda : What matters to Manowar is untamed masculinity , and the Vikings are for them merely the archetypal barbarian males . " Unlike the later Viking metal bands , Manowar did not bother with the historicity of popular Viking image , and did not in any way identify with the Vikings , religiously or racially . 
