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.
Well I saw it on “The Vikings” so OF COURSE, it was possible...LOL
Yeah, much better. I also like The Red Queen, the White Princess and my favorite...The Last Kingdom which keeps getting pushed back thanks the glow-bull scamdemic.
I enjoyed the White Queen. Haven't gotten around to watching the companion shows yet. Will soon. I might have to give Last Kingdom another try. I think I lost interest a few episodes in, but sometimes this happens when I get distracted. I gave up early on both Ozark and Better Call Saul only to give them another shot later and really enjoyed them tremendously.
In a related note, Amazon's "Wheel of Time" is a giant woke suckfest with crappy characters and cheap costumes.
No, you’re not mean, just clean, LOL!
Good hygiene is one of the reasons our life expectancy is higher than it was back then. I’m just wondering if COVID isn’t going to turn us all into Howard Hughs’s…😷
“In the sagas, the blood eagle is depicted as a way for the victim’s relatives to reclaim their lost honor.”
And this cruelty is still practiced in many parts of the world, even here in the US, in the form of “honor killings” especially of daughters who have an opinion about who they want to marry and act on it.
The thought of the fingernails alone creeps me out!
In other words, the headline is a lie. Because the "Blood Eagle," as performed on the TV show "Vikings," requires that the victim not cry out while the lungs are removed from the chest cavity and piled up on their shoulders. Which wouldn't be much of a challenge if the victim died before they got them extricated from the ribcage.
Every hillbilly who's ever processed a deer carcass knows it's possible to separate the ribs from the spine with a cutting edge and a mallet. It didn't take "a study" to figure that out. The trick is prolonging the suffering so the victims can redeem themselves by enduring silently and stoically and in that act of bravery gain admission into Valhalla.
It's equally obvious that even if you removed the lungs without killing them, they would suffocate in seconds with their lungs on their shoulders because the bronchi are pliable and would kink and/or collapse if bent to such an acute angle.
This article must be some sort of woke joke.
I think ancient social skills led to short life expectancy. :^)
The Celts and Vikings were famous for being fastidiously clean.
I think the ‘added tv crud’ is just to dehumanize them.
The Aztecs and Mayans made Vikings look like squeamish pacifists.
Goriest, most sadistic “culture” ever.
It’s not just this one show, it’s any show or movie that depicts the common people of the Medieval or Dark Ages as being dirty and filthy. Why does Hollywood think that that is necessary?..............
When I first traveled in Europe in the 60s, oh, my, how the Parisian French stunk! If you stayed in a small hotel, chances are you had to use coins to operate not only toilet stalls, but also the unreliably warm (not hot) showers (this also in Germany and Italy).
Not only the body odor and lack of deodorants, and women not shaving their armpits, but also the widespread use of unfiltered Gaulois cigarettes totally reeked. It was putrid. Add the outdoor rusting iron urinals, and when none was available, men peeing in public against any upright surface like dogs—we Amurrican college girls were appalled.
People out in the countryside were a lot cleaner, even farmers.
I have to admit I snorted with laughter reading your post...you’ve BEEN there!
Hey-just wanted to wish you and yours a very Merry Christmas, and a Happy, Healthy, and Prosperous year in 2022!
It is always nice chatting with you...:)
I think I agree. I believe the current Cartels are part of that “culture,” which is why they are so evil.
The very same good wishes and blessings to you and yours, rlmorel!!!
Probably because the “common people” remind them of us.
The scent of death, the rotting Japanese corpses and the mountains of unburied feces on Pelialu in the Pacific is said to have driven men mad. The island is hard coral in its entirety which made digging impossible so the Japanese dead just laid there where they fell until long after the fighting was done. In the hot Sun. The blo fly population exploded and that as well, drove men over the edge.
Funny...as I posted that, it was exactly what I was thinking of as I wrote, but I thought it might detract from the point I was making.
I think that was discussed in “With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa” where the author said you simply could not escape the smell.
How people went through that, I cannot imagine.
Interestingly, many of those same Marines who had to fight on that island in 110-120 degree temperatures, were recalled in Korea and had to fight the Communist Chinese around the Chosin Reservoir where the temperatures got as cold as 30-40 degrees below zero.
Those were men.
it was in all the gory details, the writters wanted to get everything as correct as possible.
Even chicken butchering leaves you fairly dirty.
But a big portion of it is the idea that people did not bathe. Which of course, if you consider bathing as soaking in a big tub or having a shower, they did not.
Water is very heavy and toting enough water for a big tub would have been reserved for the wealthy.
But a good steam followed by a plunge in cold water or even just having a couple of buckets of well water poured over you was more then possible for even the poor.
And bathing does more then just make you stink less, it keeps your skin whole and that keeps you healthy.
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