If we go through the list of the most barbaric punishments in the history of mankind, The Blood Eagle has to be near the top of the list for being the most brutal one.
Try to put yourself in this position for a moment. You’re a king in 9th century medieval England and you’ve been attacked and overrun by rather fearsome Viking hordes who’ve made the trip to kill and pillage, in that order.
You’ve been told you’re going to be executed, and so you wait in some kind of tent wondering how that’s going to play out. What usually happens on your home turf is offenders go to the chopping block.
You think, ok, it’ll be quick and painless, I’ll say my prayers and that’ll be that. I’m a martyr, heaven will be good to me. But you underestimate the brutal creativity of your foes.
You soon find out you’re going to have your ribs and lungs pulled through your back to be turned into a kind of winged creature. Damn, that’s going to be rough, you think.
That’s the blood eagle in short, but we’ll add a bit more to the description of this nasty Viking execution procedure which remains one of the worst punishments in the history of mankind.
The Execution
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Perhaps if the victim hadn’t been told what was going to happen they might have thought they were going to lose their head, as was the custom in Anglo-Saxon England. We can’t be sure if they were told or not, because there’s nothing in Viking literature that tells us so.
First, the person is laid on their chest with their back facing in the air. We also presume they were held down by a few people, or tied down.
These bits are missing in the old texts. So, the person is lying on their front, waiting. This form of execution was a kind of ritual, so no doubt it would have happened in a special place and would have been observed by a lot of Viking men.
The naked victim is then approached by an executioner with a very sharp knife, or something bigger, like an axe. He might have had an eagle carved into his skin in some cases.
This was merely an aperitif. With that knife, he then tears through the flesh in the man’s back, with so much power that he severs the ribs. Those ribs are pulled and stretched outwards, like wings.
The piece de resistance is when the man’s lungs are pulled through his back and wrapped over the rib wings. This procedure was supposed to give more of an impression of a bird’s wings, hence the blood eagle, one of the worst punishments.
The Legends
It sounds too bad to be true, so how do we know this happened? Well, during the Viking Age, they had poets, as many old cultures did back then. This was called skaldic poetry.
These poems would become parts of Sagas, stories that detailed things such as Viking invasions, the legends of great kings, bloody battles, etc. Some of these stories have survived and they have been translated.
There is a story called the “Orkneyinga saga”, and this details the exploits of a guy named Harald I Fairhair, who is said to have been the first king of Norway. He is credited with being the ruler when the Vikings took over the Northern Isles of Orkney and Shetland.
If you don’t know where they are, and we don’t expect most of you will, they are north of Scotland, but sets of islands, not on the mainland. If you didn’t know, a group of islands is called an archipelago.
See, we are not just about describing blood and gore. The saga details life on these aisles. Some scholars might question if what is written went down because the saga was written many years after King Harald was around.
It was written in the 13th century, but the Vikings were there since the 9th century. Word of mouth might have passed down the details.
Anyway, to cut a short story even shorter, one of Harold’s warrior sons named Halfdan Long-Leg was executed because he’d been involved in power struggles and had killed a member of Viking nobility and another 60 men. He’d done this with his brother.
The Saga
That brother was banished from Orkney, but the operation’s mastermind didn’t get so lucky. The son of the slain nobleman got his revenge and demanded that the blood eagle be performed on Halfdan Long-Leg as a sacrifice to God Odin.
This is how it has been translated: “Earl Einarr went up to Halfdan and cut the ‘blood eagle’ on his back, in this fashion that he thrust his sword into his chest by the backbone and severed all the ribs down to the loins, and then pulled out the lungs; and that was Halfdan’s death.”
That’s case one. Case two involves a formidable Viking warrior named Ivar the Boneless, who is said to have been the son of the Norse hero, Ragnar Loðbrok. Why “boneless” you might ask, and historians have wondered the same thing.
Some think that he wasn’t actually boneless, but that his manhood didn’t work very well. What he lacked in physically he made up for in brains, because it’s said he was an outstanding tactician in battle.
This is when the Vikings took over large parts of Anglo-Saxon England, detailed in the “Tale of Ragnar’s Sons.” It depicts what went down with the 9th-century king Ælla of Northumbria.
That’s northern England. King Ælla learns about an upcoming invasion by the great Ragnar Loðbrok. There are different accounts of what he got up to and how he died, but one such account is he is captured by King Ælla and thrown into a snake pit.
There he perishes. Ivar the Boneless is too clever to invade northern England when the army there is so strong. He bides his time.
The Blood Eagle
He stays in England but asks King Ælla for something called a “wergild”, which is a kind of compensation for a man’s life, in this case, his father’s. He tells Ælla that all he wants is an Ox’s hide, and he will take only the land that he can stretch the hide around.
In modern parlance, Ælla might have thought, what an idiot, but smart Ivar cut the hide into a very thin string and stretched that around a large area. He said this would be a new city, and that city is now supposed to be York in northern England.
Ivar then proceeds to get all the chieftains in that region on his side. He has a powerful army now and so he decides it’s time to attack the rest of England and get revenge on Ælla.
Many of the northern English pledge allegiance to Ivar because they respect him, which sounds a bit like Norse propaganda. This all ended with Ælla being captured and Ivar becoming king of North-eastern England.
His brothers go on a pillaging rampage in England and all over Europe. Ælla meanwhile is about to get one of the most dreaded punishments, the blood eagle, and in an 11th-century poem, this is how it went down.
In translation: “And Ívarr, the one, who dwelt at York, had Ella’s back, cut with an eagle.” That’s a rather family-friendly description of events. But we have another description, too, if your blood-lust wasn’t satiated.
It went like this, “They caused the bloody eagle to be carved on the back of Ælla, and they cut away all of the ribs from the spine, and then they ripped out his lungs.” Ok, so did all this happen?
Historical Facts
Well, who knows, because any historian that tells you it’s the truth or not the truth can’t be sure, either. They weren’t there. Some scholars say that Norse poets like modern poets were cryptic, used symbolism, and so weren’t always literal.
Saying that, in the 12th century a Danish poet named Saxo Grammaticus also wrote about people being cut apart and turned into an eagle, so there definitely seems to be a theme being shared in those dark days.
In that account, the Vikings took the ritual a step further and poured salt into the opened body. Some say it might have happened and others seem to think a lot has been lost in translation over the years.
You see, the writers of sagas wrote that stuff hundreds of years after the fact. As you know yourself, things tend to get exaggerated with time.
What starts as some guy pushing another in a train station can by the end of the week be a bloody brawl where someone lost teeth and an eye. A hero might also emerge from the mayhem.
Did those stories of Viking violence get embellished since people admired them and so stretched the ferocity of the Vikings? Or were they accurate? We just don’t know about these barbaric punishments, but it’s a fact the blood eagle was talked about a bit.