Pinterest A blood eagle execution. If their sagas are to be believed, the Vikings cruelly tortured their enemies in the name of their god Odin as they conquered territory. If the suggestion of a blood eagle was even uttered, one left town and never looked back.
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The Blood Eagle
Vikings as portrayed in a 19th-century source: fearsome warriors and sea raiders. Ninth-century Scandinavia has had good press in recent years. As late as the s, when Kirk Douglas filmed his notorious clunker The Vikings —a movie that featured lashings of fire and pillage, not to mention Tony Curtis clad in an ahistorical and buttocks-skimming leather jerkin —most popular histories still cast the Denmark and Norway of the Dark Ages as nations overflowing with bloodthirsty warriors who were much given to horned helmets and drunken ax-throwing contests. Today, the early Viking age has become the subject of a History Channel drama , and historians are likely to stress that the Vikings were traders and settlers, not rapists and killers. Much of this is, of course, necessary revisionism. The Vikings did build a civilization, did farm and could work metal. But, as the medievalist Jonathan Jarrett notes , the historical evidence also shows that they took thousands of slaves and deserved their reputation as much-feared warriors and mercenaries.
Did he, and other Vikings, really use a brutal method of ritual execution called the “blood eagle”?
Google Images. The blood eagle was a ritual execution described in Scandinavian skaldic poetry and the sagas as a ritual form of vengeance. Both were written at least two centuries after the events they describe, leading scholars to debate their validity as proof that the blood eagle had a basis in fact.
The blood eagle is a ritual method of execution, detailed in late skaldic poetry. According to the two instances mentioned in the Sagas , the victims in both cases members of royal families were placed in a prone position , their ribs severed from the spine with a sharp tool, and their lungs pulled through the opening to create a pair of "wings". There is continuing debate about whether the rite was a literary invention, a mistranslation of the original texts, or an authentic historic practice.
