An Anatomy of the Blood Eagle: The Practicalities of Viking Torture

The infamous blood eagle ritual has long been controversial: did Viking Age Nordic people really torture one another to death by severing their ribs from their spine and removing their lungs, or is it all a misunderstanding of some complicated poetry? Previous scholarship on the topic has tended to focus on the details and reliability of extant medieval descriptions of the blood eagle, arguing for or against the ritual's historicity. What has not yet been considered are the anatomical and sociocultural limitations within which any Viking Age blood eagle would have had to have been performed. In this article, we analyze medieval descriptions of the ritual with modern anatomical knowledge, and contextualize these accounts with up-to-date archaeological and historical scholarship concerning elite culture and the ritualized peri- and post-mortem mutilation of the human body in the Viking Age. We argue that even the fullest form of the blood eagle outlined in our textual sources would have been possible, though difficult, to perform, but would have resulted in the victim's death early in proceedings. Given the context of the ritual depicted in medieval discourse, we also argue that any historical blood eagle would have existed as part of a wider continuum of cultural praxis, and been employed to secure the social status of the ritual's commissioner following the earlier bad death of a male relative at the hands of the ritual's victim.

Automated summary

This article analyzes medieval descriptions of the blood eagle ritual using modern anatomical knowledge and the latest archaeological and historical research. The authors argue that the fullest form of the blood eagle would have been possible but would have resulted in the victim's death early on. They also suggest that the ritual would have been part of a wider cultural practice aimed at maintaining the social status of the ritual's commissioner after the death of a male relative.