Vikings have long been associated with brutal, over-the-top violence. These groups left their Nordic homelands to make their fortunes by trading and raiding across Europe.
The "blood eagle" is a gory ritual that these warriors have performed on their enemies. The victim's back was carved open and their ribs were removed from their spine in a ritual.
The eagle in the name is said to have resemblance to the movement of a bird's wings when the lungs are splayed out on the outspread ribs.
The ritual has been depicted in a number of films and TV shows.
The blood eagle has been dismissed as a myth.
The Vikings kept no records of the ritual, but they did mention their achievements in spoken poetry and sagas that were written centuries later. The bloody rite has been rejected because of repeated misunderstandings of complex poetry and a desire by Christian writers to paint their Nordic attackers as barbaric.
Our new study takes a completely different approach to the matter. Our team, made up of medical scientists and a historian, asked if the blood eagle could have been done. Our answer is yes.
The blood eagle has only ever been studied for the details of the medieval torture, with long-running debates focusing on the exact terms used to describe the "cutting" or "carving" of the eagle into the victim's back. The whole phenomenon is a misunderstanding of some complicated poetry, not something that could actually have been attempted, according to a widely-held position.
We looked at the effects a blood eagle would have on the human body, using modern knowledge and re-examining the nine medieval accounts of the ritual. The procedure would be difficult but not impossible even with the technology of the time.
We think that a particular type of Viking spearhead could have been used as a makeshift tool to zip the rib cage. A stone monument on the Swedish island of Gotland depicts a scene that could have been a blood eagle or other execution.
The victim would have died very quickly even if the ritual was carefully performed. If ribs were to be "wings" or lungs removed from a corpse, that would be done. The lastfluttering would not have happened.
The warrior elite of the Viking Age were not out of place in carrying out rituals on dead bodies, even though the blood eagle sound was less likely to be heard in modern ears.
Retrieving lost honor.
The research shows that the blood eagle ritual is in line with what we know about how the warrior elite behaved. They displayed the dead bodies of humans and animals in special rituals.
Our study looked at the skeletons of a well-dressed noblewoman who was beheaded in tenth-century Birka and buried with her head between her arm and torso, her missing jaw, and her skull. Warriors from this layer of society were willing to go to extreme lengths to protect their reputation.
The case of the blood eagle is more extreme than others because it was conducted on a captured prisoner of war who had already killed his father.
Some of the "trigger killings" in medieval sagas include victims being thrown into a pit of snakes, being burned to death in a longhouse, and having their guts torn out and nailed to a post. The blood eagle is depicted as a way for the victim's relatives to regain their honor.
We argue that the blood eagle could have taken place in the Viking Age. It was 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.
It would have ensured that everyone who heard about it would want to know the full story, just as we are telling them today.
Senior Lecturer in Medicine and Neuroscience, Monte Gates, and Senior Lecturer in Archaeology, University of Iceland, are two of the people who have studied Archaeology.
The Conversation's article is a Creative Commons licensed one. The original article can be found here.
