 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.
