In popular legends, few images like the "Blood Eagle" can match the cruelty of the Vikings. In this practice, the abuser is said to separate the victim's ribs from the spine, pull their bones and skin out to form a set of "wings", and remove their lungs from the chest cavity. This method of execution appears twice in the History Channel's hit TV series Vikings as a ritual of the protagonist's most fearsome enemy, the Borg chief and King Ælla, which is fictional and corresponds to the de facto ruler of Northumberland. In the video game Assassin's Creed: Valhalla, Boneless Ivar is a character based on a Viking chieftain who invaded the British Isles in the ninth century AD, who casts a blood eagle on his enemy King Rodley.
These descriptions drew inspiration from medieval Old Scandinavian and Latin. Of the nine extant accounts, each says that the victims were captured in battle, with some kind of eagle carved on their backs. Some references to torture are succinct. Others are more graphic, consistent with the extreme versions depicted in contemporary pop culture. In any case, this ritual appears in these texts to convey a message related to honor and revenge.
Experts have debated whether the Blood Eagle is a literary rhetoric or a real punishment. The sources of this information are often vague, referencing legends of dubious authenticity, or confusing recognized historical eras. Unless archaeologists find a corpse with clear evidence of torture on it, we may never know.
If the Vikings did do do blood eagles, does that mean the Middle Ages were as savage, dirty, and "dark" as people think they were? The Vikings, like many medieval people, may have been very violent, but perhaps no more violent than other ethnic groups at different times. Scholars' job is to understand how this violence can be adapted to a complex society — and that's exactly what a new study does.
The article, which will be published later this month in Voyeurism: A Journal of Medieval Studies, sidesteps the question of whether the ritual actually took place in the Viking Age, but instead asks if the blood eagle could serve as a method of torture. According to an interdisciplinary team of doctors, anatomists and historians, the answer is yes.
The study's co-authors, Monte Gates and Heidi Fowler, both medical scientists at Keele University in the United Kingdom, were inspired by the "Vikings" series of books to start studying blood eagles. The show took them to medieval legends, which opened up more questions and made them realize they needed to consult historians. The duo's collaboration with Luke John Murphy, a historian of religion at the University of Iceland, was remarkable, and the different perspectives of history and medicine led the two scholars to collaborate in unexpected ways.
"Studying the limitations of the anatomy of the Blood Eagle Ritual prompted me to think about the broader social and cultural constraints that any historical Blood Eagle ritual must have occurred under, Murphy said. This, in turn, led to a more nuanced discussion, not only about what might have happened, but also about how and why it happened.
In this paper, the authors methodically consult medieval sources and then discuss what effects a full version of surgery would have on the human body (in short, no benefits). Unless the operation is done with great care, the victim will quickly die of suffocation or blood loss; Even if the ritual was performed carefully, the subject was almost certainly dead before the complete Blood Eagle was completed.
"This (ritual), as it exists in popular culture today,...... This is largely due to the attitude of Victorian scholars, who were keen to exaggerate its role. ”
As Murphy explains, "The Blood Eagle plays a prominent role in the 'Vikings' we constructed in the early 21st century, who generally tend to (understand) that violence was commonplace in the Nordic regions of the Iron Age." This has been going on for a long time, he added: "This [ritual], as it exists in popular culture today,...... This is largely due to the attitude of Victorian scholars, who were keen to exaggerate its role "to emphasize the barbarism of the past and the civilized nature of their own time." For Victorians, it was a means of proving that "native" English was superior to the Viking invaders.
Studying this question from a different perspective allows researchers to dig into academic research, put medieval sources in the right context, and use modern technology to study what really happened during rituals. They used anatomical modeling software to effectively reproduce extreme versions of the Blood Eagle, simulating the effects of each step of torture on the human body. Based on the interdisciplinary leanings of the study, the authors combined this analysis with historical and archaeological data from specialized tools available in Viking society. For example, their findings suggest that the torturer may have used a spear with a shallow hook to "pull the ribs" away from the spine — a conclusion that could explain the presence of spears in one of the few (probable) visual descriptions of medieval rituals.
The blood eagle's prominence in Viking society—both in the Middle Ages and centuries thereafter—stemmed from its emphasis on ritual and revenge. This method of execution, which recurred in medieval texts, often without detailed explanation, suggests a consensus among Viking Age readers and listeners, many of whom learned about the stories through oral traditions.
For Ivar, the dreaded Viking in Assassin's Creed: Temple of Valhalla, the ancient Scandinavian Knútsdrápa simply said, "Ívarr, the man who ruled York, had the back of Ælla." (This succinct description has led some scholars to believe that an eagle was indeed used to cut through the back of King Northumberland.) Other sources describe this practice in more detail. Harald wrote in his novel in the Orkney Islands that The Viking Earl, Tolf Enal, "cut the enemy's ribs from the vertebrae with a sword and pulled out his lungs from the cracks in his back". He sacrificed his victims to Odin as a sacrifice for victory. ”
According to the authors of the new study, there was a common factor in medieval sources that attackers would perform such rituals on enemies who killed their own families. Thus, scholars have concluded that the idea that "the Blood Eagle may have formed an extreme, but not unbelievable, outlier", "bad death" in the wider Viking society: a way of revenge for "early transgression, disgrace or other culturally condemned deaths". It's a meaningful act.
University of Tennessee historian Matthew Gillis, who is about to publish a book on medieval "horror," calls medieval Christian writers "experts in terror." He said the text vignettes that appeared in the new study were meant to teach people a lesson, such as "scaring their audience and bringing them back to God." Although some Old Scandinavian sources detail the practices of Christianity before the rise of the region, they were read and recounted centuries after they were created.
Gillis's observations build on earlier research by scholar Valentine Groberna, who wrote in 2004, "Terror tends to disorient." "In medieval Europe, violence (and how violence was portrayed) was a way of expressing meaning, a way of presenting important ideas that were previously invisible. In other words, rituals like the Blood Eagle make sense because they are a way—in practice or on paper—to draw a line between crowds and warn outsiders of the dangers of crossing the border. Ritual torture like the Blood Eagle does so by turning humans into animals rather than humanizing them.
The value of this new scholarship lies in its imagination, which manages to make conceptualized things more concrete. The Vikings do stand out in the modern American public imagination. Murphy said that in the 1980s, "the general attitude in academia was ... The Vikings were unfairly portrayed as bloodthirsty barbarians who were truly shrewd (and rational) economic actors. "The pendulum has swung in the other direction.
As this new article helps illustrate, perhaps the pendulum needs to stop. We clearly show how the Vikings rode camels into Baghdad as savvy merchants and became explorers who crossed the Atlantic to open up new lands. But they are also a society that indulges in atrocities, based on the enslavement of people and the trafficking in sexual violence. All of this is true. Man is chaotic, and by extension, history is no different. Seeing the richness of the objects we have studied in the past, we can understand not only them better, but also ourselves better.