Dec 7, 2021 06:26 PM
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/d...180979148/
EXCERPTS: In popular lore, few images are as synonymous with Viking brutality as the “blood eagle,” a practice that allegedly found torturers separating the victim’s ribs from their spine, pulling their bones and skin outward to form a set of “wings,” and removing their lungs from their chest cavity...
[...] Experts have long debated whether the blood eagle was a literary trope or an actual punishment.
[...] Set to be published in Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies later this month, the article sidesteps the question of whether the ritual actually took place during the Viking Age, instead asking whether the blood eagle could feasibly serve as a torture method. The answer, according to an interdisciplinary team of medical doctors, anatomists and a historian, is a resounding yes.
Study co-authors Monte Gates and Heidi Fuller, both medical scientists at Keele University in England, were spurred to investigate the blood eagle by the “Vikings” series. The show led them to medieval sagas, which opened up further questions and made them realize they needed to consult a historian. The give-and-take nature of the pair’s collaboration with Luke John Murphy, a historian of religion at the University of Iceland, proved eminently fruitful, with the different perspectives of history and medicine pushing the scholars in unexpected ways.
“Work on the anatomical limits of the ritual spurred me to consider the wider social and cultural limits within which any historical blood eagle would have had to have taken place,” Murphy says. This, in turn, led to a more nuanced discussion of not only what could have happened, but how and why.
In the paper, the authors move methodically through the medieval sources before discussing what would happen to the human body if the fullest version of the procedure was carried out (in short, nothing good). Unless performed very carefully, the victim would have died quickly from suffocation or blood loss; even if the ritual was conducted with care, the subject would’ve almost certainly died before the full blood eagle could be completed... (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPTS: In popular lore, few images are as synonymous with Viking brutality as the “blood eagle,” a practice that allegedly found torturers separating the victim’s ribs from their spine, pulling their bones and skin outward to form a set of “wings,” and removing their lungs from their chest cavity...
[...] Experts have long debated whether the blood eagle was a literary trope or an actual punishment.
[...] Set to be published in Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies later this month, the article sidesteps the question of whether the ritual actually took place during the Viking Age, instead asking whether the blood eagle could feasibly serve as a torture method. The answer, according to an interdisciplinary team of medical doctors, anatomists and a historian, is a resounding yes.
Study co-authors Monte Gates and Heidi Fuller, both medical scientists at Keele University in England, were spurred to investigate the blood eagle by the “Vikings” series. The show led them to medieval sagas, which opened up further questions and made them realize they needed to consult a historian. The give-and-take nature of the pair’s collaboration with Luke John Murphy, a historian of religion at the University of Iceland, proved eminently fruitful, with the different perspectives of history and medicine pushing the scholars in unexpected ways.
“Work on the anatomical limits of the ritual spurred me to consider the wider social and cultural limits within which any historical blood eagle would have had to have taken place,” Murphy says. This, in turn, led to a more nuanced discussion of not only what could have happened, but how and why.
In the paper, the authors move methodically through the medieval sources before discussing what would happen to the human body if the fullest version of the procedure was carried out (in short, nothing good). Unless performed very carefully, the victim would have died quickly from suffocation or blood loss; even if the ritual was conducted with care, the subject would’ve almost certainly died before the full blood eagle could be completed... (MORE - missing details)
