Vikings and metal are made for each other. Tales of ancient gods, glorious bloody battles, raids and the raging sea are ideal themes for epic heavy music. However, today viking metal is still not a genre, but a rather vague direction. It came out of classic heavy metal, then crawled into black metal and from there it spread to all heavy music. Take any metal song – if it sings something about Vikings or Scandinavian mythology – this is already Viking metal. The style is not the most massive, but still hundreds of bands play in it – there are enough worthy ones among them. In the text, we will briefly go over the history of Viking metal, and then listen to the five most prominent contemporary representatives of the trend.
The most popular and understandable starting point for Viking metal is the 1970 Immigrant Song by Led Zeppelin.
She opens the album Led Zeppelin III. The song was inspired by the concert in Reykjavik and is dedicated to Leif Eriksson, the Viking who first visited North America. In the case of this song, there is no need to dig for a long time in search of Nordic references – everything is on the surface:
The hammer of the gods // We’ll drive our ships to new lands // To fight the horde, and sing and cry // Valhalla, I am coming!Another important appearance of Vikings in rock music of that time can be considered the song with the self-explanatory name Viking on the album Fool’s Mate by Peter Hammill, the vocalist of the cult prog band Van der Graaf Generator. The disc was released in 1971. The music of Led Zeppelin and Hammill can hardly be called metal – but that’s how it all began. Well, the hardest approach to the topic in the 70s can be considered the song Son of the Northern Light from 1978 from Heavy Load, one of the first heavy bands in Sweden. But then there was no surge of interest in the theme of the Vikings, and things did not go further than single songs.