The Vikings were famous for their fast ships and bloody raids. They have often been associated with brutal and unconscionable violence. Between the 8th and 11th centuries these groups left their Nordic lands to make their fortune trading and raiding Europe.
The ritual of the “Blood Eagle” involved opening the victim’s back and cutting the ribs from the spine, opening them and extracting the lungs through the holes made. The final flutter of the lungs deployed outside the ribcage resembled the movement of a bird’s wings, hence the macabre name of the ritual.
Unpleasant descriptions of such a horrendous ritual have recently appeared in the television series “Vikings”, in the video game “Assassins Creed: Valhalla” and in the Swedish horror film “Midsommar” (2019).
This practice had always been taken as a legend by researchers and it is easy to understand it that way when looking at the fictional products mentioned. In addition, archaeological evidence of the ritual has never been found to support the veracity of the bloody “Blood Eagle”. The Vikings themselves kept no records, having only listed their achievements through oral tradition, through the genre of poetry. These sagas were not first written down until centuries after their existence. Therefore, this bloody ritual had been dismissed as unlikely and as the result of repeated errors in oral tradition and the desire of Christian writers to paint their Norse attackers as pagan barbarians.
A new study takes a whole new approach to that. The research team is made up of doctors and a historian, to change the starting question. Instead of asking the question “Did the Blood Eagle really exist?” they made a somewhat more technical: “Could it have been done?”. And the study’s answer is a resounding yes.
Previous studies of the blood eagle had focused solely on details related to medieval textual accounts of torture, with lengthy discussions surrounding the exact terms used to describe the eagle’s “cutting” or “carving” into the back. of the unfortunate victim. The widely accepted position is that this whole phenomenon is nothing more than a misunderstanding in oral poetry, nothing that could not even have been attempted.
But modern knowledge of anatomy and physiology, coupled with a careful reappraisal of the nine medieval accounts of the ritual, casts a different light. The team did not perform the ritual on any volunteers for remuneration, but instead investigated what effects a blood eagle would have had on the human body. They found that a similar procedure would have been complicated, but not impossible to perform .
Even with the technology of the time, the ritual could have been carried out, they say in the study. The authors suspect that the Viking spearhead might have been used to open the ribcage from the back. Even more than one type for each type of fabric. It might even be depicted on a stone monument found on the Swedish island of Gotland, pictured on the cover of the article you are reading. This represents either the ritual of the blood eagle or another type of execution.
However, the researchers warn that even if the ritual had been carried out with great care, the victim would have died quickly. Therefore, any attempt to turn ribs or lungs into “wings” would have been made on a corpse. That means that the last “flutter” would not have been possible . The latter might make us think that the blood eagle was not possible then, but we must keep in mind that carrying out rituals with corpses was not unusual. Therefore, it is not at all discarded for the warrior elite of the Viking Age .
Archaeological and historical data examined in the research offer an interesting perspective on the blood eagle. And it is that this ritual fits with what is known about the behavior of the Viking warrior elite. They had no qualms about displaying human and animal corpses in special rituals, even showing spectacular executions.
The study examined ” deviant burials ,” such as the skeleton of a well-dressed noblewoman beheaded at Birka (10th century) and later buried with the remains of her own head between her arm and torso. His jaw was missing and was replaced by that of a pig. The warriors of the time, obsessed with their reputation, were willing to do anything to protect or win it back.
The case of the blood eagle seems to have been an extreme case of this behavior, which would be carried out only in exceptional circumstances: a prisoner of war who had subdued the father of the material author of the ritual or another male relative.
Other practices on the victims were throwing them into a pit of snakes, burning them inside a house or ripping their guts out and nailing them to a post. In the Viking sagas, the blood eagle is represented as a way for the relatives of the victim to recover the lost honor.
This article is based on the article Brutal Viking ‘blood eagle’ ritual execution was anatomically possible – new research , in The Conversation.
The original scientific paper is An Anatomy of the Blood Eagle: The Practicalities of Viking Torture (Speculum: Vol 97, No 1), written by Luke John Murphy, Heidi R. Fuller, Peter LT Willan, and Monte A. Gates.
