Viking blood eagle, is it really possible

[Danny McG]

I've been reading about the 'blood eagle' method of killing but I fail to see how it could be done.

The ribs are chopped through each side of the spine and then the lungs are spread out to form the eagle wing shape, the victim then suffocates.

How would that work in practice?
You chop the ribs and cut through the flesh/muscle and then you still need to open the back enough to get the lungs out.

Surely the ribs would need broken/chopped at the sides as well? Otherwise you're fighting pressure all the way round to the breastbone.

You couldn't simply lever against the spine to force a gap, when you come to do the second lung all the support has gone and you would have nothing substantial to lever against.

Was the blood eagle actually used or is it a myth?

 

[Brian G Turner]

I recently read a book about Vikings (Viking Britain: A History eBook: Thomas Williams: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store ) that claimed it was an invention. It's possibly like various modern figures of speech of what people might do to a dead body "I'll rip out your guts and squeeze the sht out of you" etc.

 

[Danny McG]

I recently read a book about Vikings (Viking Britain: A History eBook: Thomas Williams: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store ) that claimed it was an invention. It's possibly like various modern figures of speech of what people might do to a dead body "I'll rip out your guts and squeeze the sht out of you" etc.

Cheers Brian
It sounded a bit implausible re the practicalities of actually performing it

 

[Brian G Turner]

I don't know enough about it at the moment to do anything other than speculate. However, give me a couple of years and I might have been able to study Viking archaeology and Norse sagas, so be able to give a more informed response.

 

[Brian G Turner]

A couple of quotes from the book mentioned above:

Ragnarssona þáttr (‘ The Tale of Ragnar’s Sons’, written c. 1300), ‘had the eagle cut in Ella’s back, then all his ribs severed from the backbone with a sword, so that his lungs were pulled out’. Saxo Grammaticus, writing at least a hundred years earlier than the author of this account (though still 300 years after the event) gives a version of something similar, but his description is ‘milder’ in that the outline of an eagle is simply incised into Ælle’s back; no messing around with ribs and lungs flapping about all over the place (although Saxo does introduce some literal salt into the wound: ‘Not satisfied with imprinting a wound on him, they salted the mangled flesh’). 4

Williams, Thomas. Viking Britain: A History (p. 111). HarperCollins Publishers. Kindle Edition.

The supposed ‘rite of the blood-eagle’ seems, therefore, to be a myth of Viking barbarity conjured up in later centuries by antiquarians enthralled by the exoticism of their forebears and titillated by their gory antics. As Roberta Frank, the incomparable scholar of Germanic languages and literature, put it: ‘Medieval men of letters, like their modern counterparts, could sometimes be over-eager to recover the colourful rites and leafy folk beliefs of their pagan ancestors.’

Williams, Thomas. Viking Britain: A History (pp. 112-113). HarperCollins Publishers. Kindle Edition.

 

[-K2-]

Just for the record, this could have been done, but, the victim would have already perished or at the very least been well past suffering from it almost instantly (upon editing I decided to eliminate the reasons). Beyond that, it's just basic butchery. Once the integrity of the whole is so damaged, aspects move and come apart rather easily.

In fact, I would suspect that IF such a thing was ever done (of which there are worse things done round the world), it had little to nothing to do with a victim suffering, or a threat to others. All it says to me is, the person doing it is so devoid of humanity that they can pull apart a human corpse with their bare hands, without hesitation. So, the person is making a statement about themselves... nothing more. A rather pathetic statement for that matter.

K2

 

[sknox]

So nice to meet someone else who has read Saxo Grammaticus!

It may have been him, or it may have been Helmhold who relates a lovely story about a victim having his belly cut open, the entrails staked to the ground, then driven until they're all pulled out. This was done by Slav pagans along the Baltic coast. The point here being that gruesome things were done to enemies. Such reports come from such disparate sources and across centuries, I find it hard to believe they're merely a product of credulity and literary enthusiasm. There's a very long list of things that modern (19thc and after) scholars believed were unbelievable, that have since been proved to be correct, or at least credible, from Homer and Troy right up through Yersina pestis.

My medieval professor told me something that has stuck with me since grad school. We were talking about reports of miracles--blood rain, armies in the sky, etc. Two things, really. One, pay attention to the language. The authors were often careful to say "I myself saw this" or "many people said they saw it" or "it is said to have happened". Their accounts are not uniformly naive or credulous.

The second point struck me as inherently wrong at first, but over the years I've come round to his view. He said he was inclined to believe such reports as being honest, unless he had evidence otherwise. The argument "but that's scientifically impossible" not being evidence, but a statement of belief. That approach proved very helpful in understanding the mentalities of the time in their own terms, rather that through the filter of modern understanding.

Which, not incidentally, has helped me in how I approach characters in the stories I write.

 

[Extollager]

Check Tom Shippey's Laughing Shall I Die.

 

[MaxiPower]

Think it was only a myth. Something like the iron maiden torture device. Sounds too cool to be true.. Tho I'm sure maybe it may be done a few times by some mad freak lol. Have you watched the Vikings TV series that's a few years old? They do it a few times in it.