Amon Amarth is a music band based in Tumba, Sweden. It was formed in 1992.
The band refers to their genre as melodic metal. Yet, in fact, you can see a clear link with the Viking metal due to multiple allusions to Viking mythology and history in the lyrics. These allusions are also vital for understanding the meaning behind the Amon Amorth logo.
Technically speaking, the logo doesn’t contain anything apart from the name of the band, no pictorial elements at all. And yet, the very glyphs already possess such a style that they are a picture in themselves.
As we know, the Vikings used runes when they needed to record moments of great importance. They had a complete alphabet consisting of the runes of sharp, angular shape. However, if the authors of the logo had used the actual Viking runes, this would have made the writing undecipherable for the majority of the band’s fans.
So, the designers had to stick to the Latin alphabet, which was adopted only at the end of the Viking Age, with the Christianization of Scandinavia.
To reproduce the historic atmosphere, they used intricate curls and turns, elaborate decorative details, and a specific structure of the letters. It made the glyphs similar to ancient writings, even if they were not exactly from the era and culture in question. You can find a similar font among the so-called Celtic fonts.
The glyphs resemble those from Omina, a unicase type developed by Karlgeorg Hoefer. Omnia was inspired by the all-caps handwriting used in the 3rd-9th centuries. However, there are quite a few differences making the logo unique.
Throughout the years, the band has used the same logo on their album covers without making any modifications in the shape of the glyphs. Only the color of the letters has varied depending on the background.
The name of the album has typically featured a different type, though.
The cover of the Twilight of the Thunder God (2008) and Deceiver of the Gods (2013), for instance, showcased the Omnia type, which perfectly merged with the main Amon Amarth logo. The album names on the covers of The Crusher (2001), Versus the World (2002), and Berserker (2019), on the contrary, feature more traditional serif typefaces.