Posted on 12/20/2021 6:30:40 AM PST by Red Badger
Man lying on his belly with another man using a weapon on his back. (Stora Hammar Stone)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stora_Hammars_stones#/media/File:Sacrificial_scene_on_Hammars_(II).png
Famed for their swift longboats and bloody incursions, Vikings have long been associated with brutal, over-the-top violence. Between the eighth and 11th centuries, these groups left their Nordic homelands to make their fortunes by trading and raiding across Europe.
Particularly infamous is the so-called "blood eagle", a gory ritual these warriors are said to have performed on their most hated enemies. The ritual allegedly involved carving the victim's back open and cutting their ribs away from their spine, before the lungs were pulled out through the resulting wounds.
The final fluttering of the lungs splayed out on the outspread ribs would supposedly resemble the movement of a bird's wings – hence the eagle in the name.
Depictions of the ritual have recently featured in the TV series Vikings and the video game Assassins Creed: Valhalla, as well as the 2019 Swedish horror film Midsommar.
For decades, researchers have dismissed the blood eagle as a legend.
No archaeological evidence of the ritual has ever been found, and the Vikings themselves kept no records, listing their achievements only in spoken poetry and sagas that were first written down centuries later. So the bloody rite has been rejected as improbable, resulting from repeated misunderstandings of complex poetry and a desire by Christian writers to paint their Nordic attackers as barbaric heathens.
However, our new study, takes an entirely new approach on the matter. Our team, made up of medical scientists and a historian, bypassed the long-standing question of "did the blood eagle ever really happen?", asking instead: "Could it have been done?" Our answer is a clear yes.
The anatomical practicalities Previous scholarship on the blood eagle has only ever focused on the details of medieval textual accounts of the torture, with long-running debates concentrating on the exact terms used to describe the "cutting" or "carving" of the eagle into the victim's back. A widely-held position is that the whole phenomenon is a misunderstanding of some complicated poetry, not something that could actually have been attempted.
Using modern knowledge of anatomy and physiology, alongside painstaking reassessment of the nine medieval accounts of the ritual, we investigated what effect a blood eagle would have had on the human body. What we found was that the procedure itself would be difficult but far from impossible to perform, even with the technology of the time.
We suspect that a particular type of Viking spearhead could have been used as a makeshift tool to "unzip" the rib cage quickly from the back. Such a weapon might even be depicted on a stone monument found on the Swedish island of Gotland, where a scene carved into the stone depicts something that could have been a blood eagle or other execution.
However, we also realized that even if the ritual was carefully performed the victim would have died very quickly. Therefore any attempts to reshape the ribs into "wings" or remove the lungs would have been performed on a corpse. That last "fluttering" would not have happened.
While that might make the blood eagle sound even less likely to modern ears, we also demonstrate that while mutilating corpses and carrying out rituals on dead bodies was unusual, it was not totally out of character for the warrior elite of the Viking Age.
Retrieving lost honor Drawing on archaeological and historical data, our research has shown that the blood eagle ritual fits with what we know about how the Viking-Age warrior elite behaved. They had no qualms about displaying the dead bodies of humans and animals in special rituals, including during spectacular executions.
Our study specifically examined so-called "deviant burials", like the skeleton of a well-dressed noblewoman who was beheaded in tenth-century Birka and subsequently buried with the remains of her head tucked between her arm and her torso, her missing jawbone (possibly destroyed during her decapitation) replaced by a pig's mandible. Warriors from this layer of society were also obsessed with their reputations, and were willing to go to extreme lengths to protect their image.
The blood eagle seems to have been a more extreme case of this sort of behavior conducted only in exceptional circumstances: on a captured prisoner of war who had earlier subjected the ritual-doer's father (or other male relative) to a shameful death.
In medieval sagas, some of these "trigger killings" include victims being thrown into a pit of snakes, being burned to death in a longhouse without the chance of a fair fight, and even having their guts torn out and nailed to a post. In the sagas, the blood eagle is depicted as a way for the victim's relatives to reclaim their lost honor.
Contrary to established wisdom, we therefore argue that the blood eagle could very well have taken place in the Viking Age. It was physically possible, in line with broader social habits regarding execution and the treatment of corpses, and reflected a cultural obsession with demonstrating your honor and prestige.
What's more, its spectacular brutality would have ensured that everybody who heard about it would be keen to tell the story in all its gory details - just as we're still telling them today.
Luke John Murphy, Postdoctoral Researcher in Archaeology, University of Iceland; Heidi Fuller, Senior Lecturer in Medical Science, Keele University, and Monte Gates, Senior Lecturer in Medicine and Neuroscience, Keele University.
I suspect it varied by societal class.
But I’d easily believe the laborers only got a hot bath once a week or so.
The amount of adrenalin that the experience would produce in a victim would probably result in a lot of adrenergic twitching, spasms and, "fluttering" even after the heart had stopped beating.
That is still the ‘norm’ in Germany apparently.
When I went to Germany on a job in 2000, we stayed at a local B&B.
The maid was also a bartender/hostess of a restaurant we ate at downstairs. We talked a lot and she told me that she was amazed that Americans were so clean. She knew we took showers every night because she would collect the towels for the laundry every morning while we were at work on the nearby military base.
She said her husband only took a bath once a week on Saturday night..................
Byzantine art was not terribly refined.
That’ll be me after Brandon shuts off my natural gas (or prices it so high I can’t afford to turn it on).
There will be a whole lot of northeastern LIBERALS FREEZING THEIR COLLECTIVES ASSES OFF THIS WINTER......................
How long before kids are doing this to each other on TikTok?
I hope you are taking notes kids.
B.S.
Lungs don’t “flutter”. Without the suction of an intact rib cage, the lung deflate to very small lumps. Not saying they didn’t try, but the results would be very disappointing.
It is probably true that the upper classes may have not been physically dirty, but I bet they smelled to high heaven. For the majority of history, personal cleanliness was not only not a priority, it was considered unhealthy to bathe.
So there were many perfumes and things used to mask the smell of yourself and other people, otherwise, people just got used to the smell of body odor, feces, and urine.
Think of all the bad breath. It must have just been regarded as normal.
I don’t give a crap what anyone says-one of the great underappreciated parts of modern life is not having your nasal senses constantly assaulted. Having been places where that isn’t always the case, I sure appreciate is almost as much as hot running water, which is completely underappreciated by us and taken for granted!
They just figured this out? I thought the series Vikings pretty much proved such? /s
Yeah, I'm sure the public was just crying out for that ...
Thanks Red Badger. They were the middle ages' factual predecessor to the fictional Sopranos. :^)
Compare the Vikings with their modern day descendants................
Correct. Any "fluttering" (and it would be brief) could only be from blood still going from the heart into the pulmonary arteries and out into the lungs and then back to the heart by the pulmonary veins, by a still-pumping heart (which continues for a short period of time, at a greatly reduced heart rate, after a brain death or unconsciousness from shock or blood loss from other major wounds). But that assumes that the pulmonary blood vessels and heart and major blood vessels are not damaged in the opening of the back and pulling the lungs outward, and that not a great deal of blood is lost prior to that.
With tin-snips or other sharp cutting tools, the ribs could be quickly severed near the spine (the Vikings TV series showed the use of a hatchet or hand-axe for this, chopping the ribs), and then there would also have to be a second set of cuts of the ribs at each outside area of the back, to act as hinges to rotate the ribs outward (or to remove them totally). Otherwise, the springiness of ribs cut only by the spine means you couldn't easily expose or pull out the lungs. And there would have to be cuts of the muscles and connective tissues at the very top and bottom of the ribs "flap" (the rectangle of the back made by cutting the ribs at the spine and along the outer back closer to the arms) and also between the areas of the cut ribs themselves, in order to remove the "flap."
At best, there would be quick unconsciousness and death from shock and blood loss, and once the chest cavity is opened, there could not be regular breathing of the lungs, which need the closed vacuum-like space around the lungs in order for them to fill and unfill with air ("breathing"), so an asphyxial death would occur within seconds to minutes from that alone.
the victim would have died very quickly. Therefore any attempts to reshape the ribs into “wings” or remove the lungs would have been performed on a corpse. That last “fluttering” would not have happened.
= = =
There seems to be an assumption that the ‘fluttering’ is due to the victim’s last attempt at a breath.
Sorry, the diaphragm pulls and pushes the lungs inside the ribcage.
Lungs outside the ribcage are powerless on their own.
The predecessor of “A Man Called Horse.”
Just sayin’
‘Face
;o]
I believe this is the torture mentioned in the movie NORTHWEST PASSAGE(1940) when one of the men describes what happened to his kin by the Indians.
I watched a documentary about Versailles some time ago, and the the conditions the French kings lived in was just horrid. No personal hygiene like we have today, perfume on top of perfume on top of perfume.
Sanitation was almost nonexistent- people would relieve themselves wherever they happened to be if they couldn’t make it outside and the royal staff would have to clean it up- I’m surprised it doesn’t still reek hundreds of years later.
Yes...we take it all for granted. I know that over time you get used to it, but...Damn!
I have been around unwashed people, and it smelled bad. Am I a mean person for saying it? The facts are never mean.
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