The band has been accused of promoting Nazi ideologies through their use of runes and other imagery appropriated by Nazis. The band responded to these accusations with the song "Shadow of the Swastika" on the album Lay of Thrym (2011), which in the assessment of Karl Spracklen, "attacks the far-right for appropriating...heathen symbols and images associated with pre-Christian northern Europe". Even so, scholars have, in the words of Catherine Hoad and Samuel Whiting, suggested that "through imagining the Viking as an ancestral, genetic category, the 'common past' of the Nordic people is constructed as a self-identity apart from other people" in the work of Týr.Catherine Hoad, "'Hold the heathen hammer high': Viking metal from the local to the global", in Shifting Sounds: Musical Flow: A Collection of Papers from the 2012 IASPM Australia/New Zealand Conference, ed. by Oli Wilson and Sarah Attfield (Dunedin: International Association for the Study of Popular Music, 2013), pp. 62-70; . Likewise, Spracklen finds that "the themes in Týr's songs celebrate pagan identity, Viking identity and the hegemonic masculinity of the Viking warrior combined with the modern-day heavy metal anthem of being an individual".
