Valkyries

The Valkyries are depicted as a mounted host in the cover painting for Bathory’s Blood Fire Death, where they help mark the album’s shift from B-grade horror imagery toward Scandinavian and Teutonic myth. Their appearance brings the mythic world of the Wild Hunt into the visual frame of a record whose music also turned toward more elaborate, thoughtful forms of extreme metal.

Depiction on the Album Cover

The cover shows an airborne army of enraged Valkyries on black horses, urged onward by Thor, who holds his hammer aloft. Below them, a wolfskin-cloaked warrior drags a naked girl up from scorched earth. The scene is a romantic painting by Norwegian artist Peter Nicolai Arbo, and its scale and mythic subject matter sharply contrast with the B-grade horror art of Bathory’s previous album.

Folklore and Album Context

The painting depicts the Wild Hunt, known in Scandinavian and Teutonic folklore as Oskorei. The Valkyries thus belong to an explicitly folkloric image rather than appearing as characters in a narrated episode. Their charging host supplies the cover with its central sense of supernatural motion and force, while Thor’s presence places them within a broader mythic setting.

Blood Fire Death reached record shops in 1988, and its cover served as an entryway into the album’s new sound: more accessible than Bathory’s earlier noise, but still brutal. The opening instrumental, “Odens Ride Over Nordland,” evokes the cover as a kind of soundtrack, with Odin riding Sleipnir across the heavens. The track invokes the same Norse mythic world, although the evidence identifies Odin—not the Valkyries—as its rider.