An Anatomy of the Blood Eagle: The Practicalities of Viking Torture

I have always wondered if it was really a thing that actually happened after seeing it depicted in the episode Blood Eagle (S2E7) of Vikings.

Almost everything we have about the Scandinavian people of that time frame is distorted through time and religion and the simple challenge of turning a story into a song.

So, to believe that they engaged in this complicated performative death ritual, that by all reasonable understanding of human anatomy wouldn't have even worked that way it's portrayed, it seems to make it a simple call to say it's bullshit and never happened.

There were lots of contemporaneous historical records of Vikings made by the English.

Well that was grim.

Agreed. I'm not a fan of flagging, so I won't flag it, but that paper is sufficiently disturbing that I will advise not reading it. There are plenty of other better ways to spend the next ten minutes.

A title like "practicalities of $torture_practice" is pretty much self-flagging, even if you don't know offhand what the blood eagle was.

Thanks for the tip. Sometimes being days behind in reading HN posts is an advantage

yet very interesting all together

What the fuck