The infamous blood eagle ritual has long been controversial: did Viking Age Nordic people really torture one another to death by severing their ribs from their spine and removing their lungs, or is it all a misunderstanding of some complicated poetry? Previous scholarship on the topic has tended to focus on the details and reliability of extant medieval descriptions of the blood eagle, arguing for or against the ritual's historicity. What has not yet been considered are the anatomical and sociocultural limitations within which any Viking Age blood eagle would have had to have been performed. In this article, we analyze medieval descriptions of the ritual with modern anatomical knowledge, and contextualize these accounts with up-to-date archaeological and historical scholarship concerning elite culture and the ritualized peri-and post-mortem mutilation of the human body in the Viking Age. We argue that even the fullest form of the blood eagle outlined in our textual sources would have been possible, though difficult, to perform, but would have resulted in the victim's death early in proceedings. Given the context of the ritual depicted in medieval discourse, we also argue that any historical blood eagle would have existed as part of a wider continuum of cultural praxis, and been employed to secure the social status of the ritual's commissioner following the earlier "bad death" of a male relative at the hands of the ritual's victim.The authors would like to thank Tom Lovelock for generating digital images to illustrate anatomical structures affected by a blood eagle procedure, and 3D4Medical (https://3d4medical.com/) for permission to use the Complete Anatomy software for the production of images. We also would like to thank Luke Welsh (Keele University) for his helpful discussions on the anatomy of the posterior trunk, and Adam Parsons (Blueaxe Reproductions) for his help with Iron Age tools. We are also deeply grateful for the assistance of many curators, librarians, and publishers-particularly Rebecca Sampson (York Archaeological Trust) and Emilie Myhre (Norges forskningsråd)-in securing the rights to reproduce the images included in this article. Finally, we would like to thank Dr. Catherine Holmes (University College, Oxford), Editor of the English Historical Review; Dr. Pernille Hermann (Aarhus University), Editor of Viking and Medieval Scandinavia; Prof. Katherine L. Jansen (Catholic University of America), Editor of Speculum, as well as a number of anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback, advice and encouragement on the early drafts of this manuscript. The Article Processing Fee enabling us to make this research Open Access was generously covered by a University of Leicester Open Access grant.All authors take responsibility for the final form of this text. Luke John Murphy takes primary responsibility for the sections titled "The Medieval Discourse of the Blood Eagle" and "The Sociocultural Context of the Blood Eagle," and has produced the translations; Heidi R. Fuller and Monte A. Gates share primar...
