Blood Eagle: Medieval Torture by Vikings Transforms Humans Into Birds

By tearing out the victim's ribs, the infamous medieval torture known as "blood eagle," which was allegedly used by Vikings, would transform humans into birds.

Lore of the Blood Eagle

Few images in popular culture are more closely associated with Viking violence than the "blood eagle," a method of torture in which the victim's ribs were purportedly severed from their spine, and their skin and bones were pulled outward to form a pair of "wings," and their lungs were allegedly expelled from their chest cavity.

Experts have long argued over whether the blood eagle was an actual punishment or only a literary trope.

The sources are frequently ambiguous, including legendary people of questionable reliability, or altering the timeline of known historical events.

The practice has never been connected to any archaeological findings, and the Vikings themselves did not keep any documentation, recording their accomplishments only in oral poetry and sagas that initially emerged centuries later.

The violent rite has thus been dismissed as improbable.

It was assumed to be a result of repeated misreadings of intricate poetry and a desire to portray Nordic assailants as barbaric.

Feasibility of Transforming Humans into Birds

Previous scholarship solely focused on medieval textual accounts of the blood eagle.

Previous research was limited to the descriptions of the blood eagle found in medieval texts, and there have been ongoing discussions about the exact language used to explain the "carving" of the eagle into the back of the victim.

Many contend that it is not a workable practice and that it misinterprets complicated poetry.

A team of experts carefully examined nine medieval records of the ceremony while applying contemporary anatomical and physiological expertise.

They discovered that even with the available technology, executing a blood eagle would be difficult but not impossible.

The researchers hypothesized that a particular kind of Viking spearhead may have functioned as an improvised instrument to quickly "unzip" the victim's rib cage from his back.

It's interesting that a stone monument discovered in Gotland, Sweden, depicts what might be this weapon: a scenario that resembles a blood eagle or another method of death.

The experts admitted that the victim would have passed away quickly even if the ritual had been carefully performed.

Therefore, any efforts to remove the lungs or form the ribs into "wings" would have been made after death. The idea that the ribs were "fluttering" like wings would not have been possible.

The researchers showed that, although uncommon, performing rites on the dead and dissecting bodies were not entirely unfamiliar to the warrior elite of the Viking Age, which may lessen the credibility of the blood eagle to modern sensibilities, according to Science Alert.

Reason for Medieval Torture

Because it places such a strong focus on ritual and retribution, the blood eagle is as prominent in Viking culture now as it was in the Middle Ages.

The execution method frequently appears in medieval sources, frequently without any further explanation, which shows that readers and listeners of the Viking era, many of whom would have received the stories orally, shared a common understanding of it.

The aggressors performing the ritual on foes who murdered family members are a recurring theme in medieval literature, claimed the authors of the study.

As a result, the researchers have concluded that the blood eagle may have represented an extreme but not an improbable outlier to the idea of the "bad death" within larger Viking society: a mechanism to exact revenge on a previous deviant, dishonorable, or otherwise culturally condemned death, which hails the death as a meaningful action, according to the Smithsonian Magazine.

The study done by Luke John Murphy and his team was published in 2022 in Speculum: The Journal of the Medieval Academy of America.