Notes
Luke John Murphy is Post-Doctoral Researcher at the University of Leicester ([email protected]).
Heidi R. Fuller is Senior Lecturer at the School of Pharmacy and Bioengineering, Keele University, and the Wolfson Centre for Inherited Neuromuscular Disease, RJAH Orthopaedic Hospital.
Peter L. T. Willan is former Professor of Anatomy and is currently Teaching Fellow at Keele University.
Monte A. Gates is Senior Lecturer at the School of Medicine, Keele University, and the School of Pharmacy and Bioengineering, Keele University ([email protected]).
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 primary responsibility for the section titled “The Anatomical Practicalities of the Blood Eagle.”
1The texts use variations of “[at] rísta/skera/marka [blóð]ǫrn.” See discussion of each individual account below.
2Saxo Grammaticus, Gesta Danorum: The History of the Danes 9.5.5, ed. Karsten Friis-Jensen, trans. Peter Fisher, 2 vols. (Oxford, 2015), 1:664: “dorsum plaga aquilam figurante affici iuben.” A synoptic history of the Danes, including euhemerized accounts of pre-Christian mythology, the Gesta Danorum was produced in Denmark during the thirteenth century. See further Karsten Friis-Jensen, ed., Saxo Grammaticus: A Medieval Author between Norse and Latin Culture, Danish Medieval History & Saxo Grammaticus 2 (Copenhagen, 1981).
3Sigvatr Þórðarson, Knútsdrápa, ed. Matthew Townend, Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas, vol. 1, From Mythical Times to c. 1035, ed. Diana Whaley, Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 1 (Turnhout, 2012), 651. Knútsdrápa is a skaldic poem in praise of Knútr inn ríki, likely composed in the 1020s or 1030s. The poem as a whole celebrates the monarch’s successful subjugation of England in 1016–17 in typically terse skaldic style, with the opening strophe setting the scene by invoking the successful Viking incursion that overthrew—and allegedly inflicted a blood eagle upon—King Ælla of Northumbria in 867 or 868.
4Ragnars saga loðbrókar, ed. Guðni Jónsson and Bjarni Vilhjálmsson, Fornaldarsögur Norðurlanda, 3 vols. (Reykjavík, 1943–44), 1:143, and translated in The Saga of the Volsungs: With the Saga of Ragnar Lothbrok, trans. Jackson Crawford (Indianapolis, 2017), 85–133. Ragnars saga recounts the life of the eponymous king, who is believed to have lived in the mid-ninth century, including the death of his (alleged) killer, Ælla. However, the thirteenth-century fornaldarsaga blends credible and legendary episodes, and is a highly literary construction reflecting a widespread cultural discourse regarding Ragnar and his family; Elizabeth Ashman Rowe, Vikings in the West: The Legend of Ragnarr Loðbrók and His Sons, Studia Medievalia Septentrionalia 18 (Vienna, 2012), 207–16. Cf. Rory McTurk, Studies in Ragnars saga Loðbrókar and Its Major Scandinavian Analogues, Medium Ævum Monographs New Series 15 (Oxford, 1991).
5Reginsmál, ed. Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, Eddukvæði, 2 vols. (Reykjavík, 2014), 2:302, and translated in The Poetic Edda, trans. Carolyne Larrington (Oxford, 1996), 151–56. Reginsmál is an eddic poem, part of the heroic collection in the second half of the late-thirteenth-century Codex Regius. Its dating (and even status as a separate text from adjacent poems) is complicated, but it has been suggested that the poem as it now stands shares a common ancestor with both the main manuscripts of Sorra Edda on the one hand and Vǫlsunga saga and Ragnars saga on the other (Klaus von See et al., eds., Kommentar zu den Liedern der Edda, vol. 5, Heldenlieder: Frá dauða Sinfiǫtla, Grípisspá, Reginsmál, Fáfnismál, Sigrdrífumál, Kommentar zu den Liedern der Edda 5 [Heidelberg, 2006], 264–73). The vocabulary of the prose passages between the verses provides a terminus post quem in the late twelfth century, although it remains possible the poetic verses were recycled from earlier texts (von See et al., eds., Kommentar, vol. 5, Heldenlieder, 274).
6Reginsmál, ed. Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, Eddukvæði, 2:302.
7Saxo Grammaticus, Gesta Danorum 9.5.5, ed. Friis-Jensen, trans. Fisher, 1:664, “figurante.”
8Snorri Sturluson, Haralds saga ins hárfagra, in Heimskringla, ed. Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson, 3 vols., Íslenzk Fornrit 26–28 (Reykjavík, 1941–51), 1:132, and translated in Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, trans. Alison Finlay and Anthony Faulkes, 3 vols. (London, 2011–15), 1:54–87. Haralds saga forms part of Heimskringla, a compilation of konungasögur laying out the history of Norway that is generally accepted to have been compiled by Snorri Sturluson, the Icelandic scholar-statesman, in the first half of the thirteenth century. Snorri may have drawn on Orkneyinga saga for his account of the blood eagle, as Heimskringla and Orkneyinga saga share a complicated textual relationship. Compare the arguments of Finnbogi Guðmundsson, ed., Orkneyinga saga, Íslenzk Fornrit 34 (Reykjavík, 1965), xxxi, to those presented by The Orkneyinga Saga: A New Translation with Introduction and Notes, trans. Alexander Burt Taylor (Edinburgh, 1938), 59–62. See also Judith Jesch, “Orkneyinga Saga: A Work in Progress?,” in Creating the Medieval Saga: Versions, Variability and Editorial Interpretations of Old Norse Saga Literature, ed. Judy Quinn and Emily Lethbridge, Viking Collection 18 (Odense, 2010), 153–73, 289–324, esp. 161–62.
9Orkneyinga saga, ed. Finnbogi Guðmundsson, 13, and translated in Orkneyinga Saga: The History of the Earls of Orkney, trans. Hermann Pálsson and Paul Edwards (London, 1978; repr. 1981). Recounting the lives of the various rulers of Orkney and the Shetland Isles, Orkneyinga saga is an Icelandic saga that does not conform to any of the major generic groupings employed in modern scholarship. No complete version of the text is extant, and Jesch has demonstrated that even the fullest witness—the late-fourteenth-century Flateyjarbók—represents a particular (late) stage in the text’s development (“Orkneyinga Saga: A Work in Progress?”). Cf. Elizabeth Ashman Rowe, The Development of Flateyjarbók: Iceland and the Norwegian Dynastic Crisis of 1389, Viking Collection 15 (Odense, 2005), 98–104. While the earliest exemplar was likely compiled around 1200, subsequent versions drew on other texts and conventions circulating in the medieval literary milieux, and its blood eagle episode in particular shares a great deal with Snorri’s Haralds saga account of the same events, which might suggest a close—or even intertextual—relationship (Orkneyinga saga, ed. Finnbogi Guðmundsson, xxxi, and The Orkneyinga Saga, trans. Taylor, 59–62).
10Orms þáttr Stórólfssonar, ed. Þórhallur Vilmundarson and Bjarni Vilhjálmsson, Harðar Saga, Íslenzk Fornrit 13 (Reykjavík, 1991), 418, and translated in The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, including 49 Tales, ed. Viðar Hreinsson et al., vol. 3, trans. Matthew Driscoll (Reykjavík, 1997), 455–67. Labeled a fornaldarþáttr by Elizabeth Ashman Rowe and Joseph Harris (“Short Prose Narrative (þáttr),” in A Companion to Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and Culture, ed. Rory McTurk, Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture 31 [Oxford, 2005], 462–78, at 464), Orms þáttr Stórólfssonar displays an uneasy generic hybrid of íslendingasaga and fornaldarsaga features, and has been tentatively dated to the second or third quarter of the fourteenth century by Þórhallur Vilmundarson and Bjarni Vilhjálmsson, eds., Orms þáttr, cxc. The text is biographical, charting the adventures of its pseudo-historical Icelandic strongman protagonist, and shows interest in the supranatural, albeit at a safe remove from its Icelandic audience in Denmark and Norway, where its blood eagle episode also occurs.
11Norna-Gests þáttr, ed. Guðni Jónsson and Bjarni Vilhjálmsson, Fornaldarsögur Norðurlanda, 1:179, and translated in Stories and Ballads from the Far Past, trans. N. Kershaw (Cambridge, UK, 1921), 14–37. The þáttr is one of the so-called “pagan-contact þættir” (Rowe and Harris, “Short Prose Narrative,” 463), where Christian figures are confronted with aspects of Scandinavia’s pagan past. The text consists of a framework narrative set in the court of Óláfr Tryggvason (i.e., late-tenth-century Norway) and an autobiographical account of Norna-Gestr himself, a pagan who claimed to have been more than three centuries old and to have witnessed many of the great events of pre-Christian legend—including the blood eagle performed on Lyngvi. The text is preserved in a number of manuscripts, the oldest of which (Flateyjarbók (also known as Reykjavík, Stofnun Árna Magnússonar í íslenskum fræðum / The Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies, MS GkS 1005 fol.) and Copenhagen, Den Arnamagnæanske Samling / The Arnamagnæan Institute, MS AM 62 fol.) date to the late fourteenth century.
12Ragnarssona þáttr, ed. Guðni Jónsson and Bjarni Vilhjálmsson, Fornaldarsögur Norðurlanda, 1:158, and translated in The Sagas of Ragnar Lodbrok, trans. Ben Waggoner (New Haven, 2009), 63–73. Also known as Þáttr af Ragnars sonum, Ragnarssona þáttr is a fornaldarsaga text covering much the same ground as Ragnars saga. It survives only in the early-fourteenth-century Hauksbók manuscript, which may be the collection for which it was first composed; Rowe, Vikings in the West, 228–36. The þáttr’s account of Ragnar’s death and subsequent killing of Ælla in revenge is less detailed than the saga’s, and would appear to reflect a knowledge of and interest in medieval Norwegian, rather than Icelandic, concerns; Rowe, Vikings in the West, 235–36.
13Snorri Sturluson, Haralds saga, ed. Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson, 1:132.
14Sigvatr Þórðarson, Knútsdrápa, ed. Townend, 65.
15Roberta Frank, “Viking Atrocity and Skaldic Verse: The Rite of the Blood-Eagle,” English Historical Review 99 (1984): 332–43, at 339.
16Frank, “Viking Atrocity and Skaldic Verse”; Bjarni Einarsson, “De Normannorum Atrocitate, or on the Execution of Royalty by the Aquiline Method,” Saga-Book of the Viking Society 22 (1986–89): 79–82; Roberta Frank, “The Blood-Eagle Again,” Saga-Book of the Viking Society 22 (1986–89): 287–89; Bjarni Einarsson, “Blóðörn—An Observation on the Ornithological Aspect,” Saga-Book of the Viking Society 23 (1990–93): 80–81; and Roberta Frank, “Ornithology and the Interpretation of Skaldic Verse,” Saga-Book of the Viking Society 23 (1990–93): 81–83. Cf. also McTurk, Studies in Ragnars saga, 230.
17Frank, “The Blood-Eagle Again,” 287, our emphasis.
18The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a vernacular chronicle tradition begun in the last thirty years of the ninth century—that is, between three and thirty two years after Ælla’s death—tersely states only that Ælla and his rival Osberht (another Northumbrian magnate) were both killed in the siege of York, with no mention of ritualized torture: “⁊ þa ciningas bægen ofslægene” [and there both kings were struck down]; The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition, vol. 7, MS. E: A Semi-Diplomatic Edition with Introduction and Indices, ed. Susan Irvine (Cambridge, UK, 2004), 48. Asser’s late-ninth-century Vita Ælfredi regis Angul Saxonum, the late-tenth-century Chronicon Æthelweardi, and Symeon of Durham’s early-twelfth-century Historia Regum all take the same line; Asser, Asser’s Life of King Alfred: Together with the Annals of Saint Neots Erroneously Ascribed to Asser, ed. William Henry Stevenson (Oxford, 1904), 23; Chronicon Æthelweardi: The Chronicle of Æthelweard, ed. Alistair Campbell (London, 1962), 36; and Symeonis Dunelmensis Opera et Collectanea, vol. 1, ed. John Hodgson Hinde, Publications of the Surtees Society 51 (Durham, 1868), 48. Nonetheless, we are hesitant to regard this as definitive proof that Ælla was not captured and tortured to death by one or more of Ragnar’s sons at York; it might be that for the Old English and subsequent Anglo-Latin texts, “captured in the battle at York and tortured to death shortly afterwards as a direct result” and “killed in the battle at York” were more or less the same thing, and that their terse style favored the latter expression.
19Frank, “Viking Atrocity and Skaldic Verse,” 341.
20Sigurðar saga þǫgla is an Icelandic saga conventionally dated to the fourteenth century. It follows the fantastic adventures of the eponymous hero and his two brothers, and has been counted among the lygisögur (lit. “lying sagas”), a genre of late medieval prose fiction characterized by Matthew Driscoll as “an exotic (non-Scandinavian), vaguely chivalric milieu … characterized by an extensive use of foreign motifs and a strong supernatural or fabulous element”; Matthew Driscoll, “Late Prose Fiction (lygisögur),” in A Companion to Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and Culture, ed. McTurk, 190–204, at 191. In an episode where the eponymous Sigurðr’s brothers are captured by Sedentiana, a Maiden King, she “þa let … taka suerd og let ʀijsta ugla ꜳ bake þeim med suerdzoddunum” [then had a sword taken, and had an owl carved onto their backs with the sword point]; Late Medieval Icelandic Romances, vol. 2, Saulus saga ok Nikanors, Sigurðar saga þǫgla, ed. Agnete Loth, trans. J. B. Dodsworth, Editiones Arnamagnæanæ Series B 21 (Copenhagen, 1963), 127. See further Henric Bagerius, “Romance and Violence: Aristocratic Sexuality in Late Medieval Iceland,” Mirator 14 (2013): 79–96. On Maiden King sagas more generally, see Erik Wahlgren, “The Maiden King in Iceland” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1938); Marianne E. Kalinke, “The Misogamous Maiden Kings of Icelandic Romance,” Scripta Islandica 37 (1986): 47–71; Bridal-Quest Romance in Medieval Iceland (Ithaca, NY, 1990); and Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir, “From Heroic Legend to ‘Medieval Screwball Comedy’? The Origins, Development and Interpretation of the Maiden-King Narrative,” in The Legendary Sagas: Origins and Development, ed. Ármann Jakobsson, Annette Lassen, and Agneta Ney (Reykjavík, 2012), 229–49.
21Frank, “The Blood-Eagle Again,” 287.
22That it was Ælla’s back that was cut by the eagle in this reading might be an attempt to suggest the Northumbrian king was killed from behind, implying he cowardly fled from battle. On the Beasts of Battle motif in Old Norse literature, see Judith Jesch, “Eagles, Ravens and Wolves: Beasts of Battle, Symbols of Victory and Death,” in The Scandinavians from the Vendel Period to the Tenth Century: An Ethnographic Perspective, ed. Judith Jesch, Studies in Historical Archaeoethnology 5 (Woodbridge, UK, 2002), 251–80. On the motif in Old English literature, see Francis P. Magoun, Jr., “The Theme of the Beasts of Battle in Anglo-Saxon Poetry,” in Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 56 (1955): 81–90; Thomas Honegger, “Form and Function: The Beasts of Battle Revisited,” English Studies 79 (1999): 289–98; and Hugo Edward Britt, “The Beasts of Battle: Associative Connections of the Wolf, Raven and Eagle in Old English Poetry” (PhD diss., University of Melbourne, 2014).
23Jan de Vries, Altgermanische Religionsgeschichte, 3rd ed., 2 vols., Grundriss der germanischen Philologie 12 (Berlin, 1970), 1:411–12; Alfred P. Smyth, Scandinavian Kings in the British Isles, 850–880 (Oxford, 1977), 192; and Klas af Edholm, “Att rista blodörn: Blodörnsriten sedd som offer och ritualiserad våldspraktik i samband med maktskiften i fornnordisk tradition,” Scripta Islandica 69 (2018): 5–40.
24Orkneyinga saga, ed. Finnbogi Guðmundsson, 13.
25Gautreks saga, ed. Guðni Jónsson and Bjarni Vilhjálmsson, Fornaldarsögur Norðurlanda, 3:6, and translated in Seven Viking Romances, trans. Hermann Pálsson and Paul Edwards (London, 1985), 140–41. On the Ætternisstapi, see further Birgitta Odén, “Ättestupan—myt eller verklighet?,” Scandia: Tidskrift för historisk forskning 62 (1996): 221–34.
26Miranda Aldhouse-Green, Dying for the Gods: Human Sacrifice in Iron Age & Roman Europe (Stroud, 2001).
27For example, Mike Dash, “The Vengeance of Ivarr the Boneless: Did He, and Other Vikings, Really Use a Brutal Method of Ritual Execution Called the ‘Blood Eagle’?,” Smithsonian Magazine (March 18, 2013), https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-vengeance-of-ivarr-the-boneless-4002654/ (last accessed 28 August 2021).
28For example, Sharon Turner, History of the Anglo-Saxons, 6th ed., 3 vols., Collection of Ancient and Modern British Authors 270–271 (Paris, 1840), 1:304; J. M. Lappenberg, Geschichte von England, 10 vols. (Hamburg, 1834–98), 1:302; and J. M. Lappenberg, A History of England under the Anglo-Saxon Kings, trans. Benjamin Thorpe, 2 vols. (London, 1845), 2:34.
29Snorri Sturluson, Haralds saga, ed. Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson, 1:132: “ofan á lendar.”
30Alexandre Mendonça Munhoz et al., “Periareolar Skin-Sparing Mastectomy and Latissimus Dorsi Flap with Biodimensional Expander Implant Reconstruction: Surgical Planning, Outcome, and Complications,” Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery 119/6 (2007): 1637–49.
31For example, Orkneyinga saga, ed. Finnbogi Guðmundsson, 13: “rifin … frá hrygginum.”
32Jason Forman et al., “Blunt Impacts to the Back: Biomechanical Response for Model Development,” Journal of Biomechanics 48/12 (2015): 3219–26.
33Guillermo Gutierrez, H. David Reines, and Marian E. Wulf-Gutierrez, “Clinical Review: Hemorrhagic Shock,” Critical Care 8/5 (2004): 373–81.
34Frank K. Butler et al., “Management of Open Pneumothorax in Tactical Combat Casualty Care: TCCC Guidelines Change 13–02,” Journal of Special Operations Medicine 13/3 (2013): 81–86.
35Marc Noppen et al., “Quantification of the Size of Primary Spontaneous Pneumothorax: Accuracy of the Light Index,” Respiration 68/4 (2001): 396–99, and K. Hoi, B. Turchin, and Anne-Maree Kelly, “How Accurate Is the Light Index for Estimating Pneumothorax Size?,” Australasian Radiology 51/2 (2007): 196–98.
36Siam Singhal et al., “Morphometry of the Human Pulmonary Arterial Tree,” Circulation Research 33 (1973): 190–97, and C. L. N. Robinson, N. L. Müller, and C. Essery, “Clinical Significance and Measurement of the Length of the Right Main Bronchus,” Canadian Journal of Surgery: Journal Canadien de Chirurgie 32/1 (1989): 27–28.
37Robinson, Müller, and Essery, “Clinical Significance and Measurement of the Length of the Right Main Bronchus,” 27–28, and Singhal et al., “Morphometry of the Human Pulmonary Arterial Tree,” 190–97.
38Snorri Sturluson, Haralds saga, ed. Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson, 1:132: “lagði sverði á hol við hrygginn.”
39The classical study of Late Iron Age swords is Jan Petersen, De norske vikingesverd: En typologisk-kronologisk studier over vikingetidens vaaben, Videnskapsselskapets Skrifter 2 (Kristiania, 1919). Cf. also an updated typology in Ian G. Peirce, Swords of the Viking Age (Woodbridge, UK, 2002).
40Orms þáttr, ed. Þórhallur Vilmundarson and Bjarni Vilhjálmsson, 418. What precisely might have been regarded as a sax and what a sword seems to have varied significantly over the course of the Nordic Iron and Middle Ages: one key distinction is that söx were always single-edged, but swords could be single- or double-edged. In Norway, there seems to have been a change from short, broad fighting knives to longer, sword-like blades around the year 700 AD, Hans Gude Gudesen, Merovingertiden i Øst-Norge: Kronologi, kulturmønstre og tradisjonsforløp, Varia 2 (Oslo, 1980), 36–39. For Swedish swords, söx, and fighting knives, see Pär Olsén, Die Saxe von Valsgärde, Valsgärdestudien 2 (Uppsala, 1945).
41See, for example, Kristján Eldjárn, Kuml og haugfé: Úr heiðnum sið á Íslandi, ed. Adolf Friðriksson, 2nd ed. (Reykjavík, 2000).
42While some post-medieval Nordic billhooks feature “back hooks” for manipulating smaller branches, this feature does not appear on any of the Iron Age arboreal tools in the archaeological record. The two Anglo-Scandinavian billhooks from the Flixborough tool hoard, for example, both have a single straight edge; Lisa M. Wastling and Patrick Ottaway, “Cultivation, Crop Processing and Food Procurement,” in Life and Economy at Early Medieval Flixborough, c. AD 600–1000: The Artefact Evidence, ed. D. H. Evans and Christopher Loveluck, Excavations at Flixborough 2 (Oxford, 2009), 243–52, at 245, and Patrick Ottaway et al., “Woodworking, the Tool Hoard and Its Lead Containers,” in Life and Economy at Early Medieval Flixborough, ed. Evans and Loveluck, 253–77, at 258, fig. 7.9.
43No particular arrangements beyond the procuring of weapons are noted in our textual sources, although their literary nature does not necessarily preclude preparations having been made in a putative historical case.
44Petersen, De norske vikingesverd, 33–34; figs. 23–24.
45Petersen (De norske vikingesverd, 22–36) employed lugs as a typological characteristic, although this was later challenged by Signe Horn Fuglesang, Some Aspects of the Ringerike Style: A Phase of 11th Century Scandinavian Art, Mediaeval Scandinavia Supplements 1 (Odense, 1980), 139. Cf. also James T. Lang, “A Viking Age Spear-Socket from York,” Medieval Archaeology 25 (1981): 157–60.
46Lang, “A Viking Age Spear-Socket from York.”
47Jan H. Orkisz, “Pole-Weapons in the Sagas of Icelanders: A Comparison of Literary and Archeological Sources,” Acta Periodica Duellatorum 4/1 (2016): 177–212, and Yulia Shtyryakova, “A Quest for the Atgeir: The Unknown Viking Weapon in Icelandic Sagas and Archaeological Data,” Acta Periodica Duellatorum 7/1 (2019): 27–60.
48The Gotlandic picture stones are freestanding iconographic monuments raised on the Baltic island of Gotland during the mid-to-late Iron Age (c. 400–1100). During this period, and well into the Nordic Middle Ages, Gotland appears to have had an insular culture related to but distinct from mainland Scandinavian societies, with its own forms of dress, burial custom, social organization, and East Norse language. The Gotland picture stones (just over 400 of which are known, almost all in Gotland) appear to have been raised in four distinct phases, with different iconographical discourses—but are always understood as either grave markers or memorial monuments. Lärbro St. Hammars I is a particularly elaborate example of a Phase 3 stone (c. 800–1000); these feature multiple panels depicting people, ships, animals, and other recognizable phenomena, and have long been linked to medieval narrative sources. For an overview of this line of study, see Aðalheiður Guðmundsdóttir, “Saga Motifs on Gotland Picture Stones: The Case of Hildr Högnadóttir,” in Gotland’s Picture Stones: Bearers of an Enigmatic Legacy, ed. Maria Herlin Karnell, Reports from the Friends of the Historical Museum Association 84 (Visby, 2012), 59–71. The stones are catalogued in Sune Lindqvist, Gotlands Bildsteine, 2 vols. (Stockholm, 1941–42), partially updated in Laila Kitzler Åhfeldt, “3D Scanning of Gotland Picture Stones with Supplementary Material: Digital Catalogue of 3D Data,” Journal of Nordic Archaeological Science 18 (2013): 55–65, and subject to an extensive reexamination with photogrammetric methods in Sigmund Oehrl, Die Bildsteine Gotlands: Probleme und neue Wege ihrer Dokumentation, Lesung und Deutung, 2 vols., Studia Archaeologiae Medii Aevi 3 (Friedberg, 2019). For an overview and study of their function as grave markers, see Anders Andrén, “Doors to Other Worlds: Scandinavian Death Rituals in Gotlandic Perspectives,” Journal of European Archaeology 1 (1993): 33–55. For recent studies of Iron (particularly Viking) Age Gotlandic identity, ritual, and religion, see Anders Andrén, “Servants of Thor? The Gotlanders and Their Gods,” in News from Other Worlds: Studies in Nordic Folklore, Mythology and Culture in Honor of John F. Lindow, ed. Merrill Kaplan and Timothy R. Tangherlini, Occasional Monograph 1 (Berkeley, 2012), 92–100, and Luke John Murphy, “Processes of Religious Change in Late-Iron Age Gotland: Rereading, Spatialization, and Enculturation,” in Place and Space in the Medieval World, ed. Meg Boulton, Jane Hawkes, and Heidi Stoner (London, 2018), 32–46.
49Lindqvist, Gotlands Bildsteine, 1:104–7, esp. fig. 81. Cf. Aðalheiður Guðmundsdóttir, “Saga Motifs on Gotland Picture Stones.”
50Oehrl, Die Bildsteine Gotlands, 1:61–62.
51Åhfeldt, “3D Scanning of Gotland Picture Stones,” and Oehrl, Die Bildsteine Gotlands.
52We are grateful to an anonymous peer reviewer for bringing this discrepancy to our attention. Hauck himself is reported to have expressed some skepticism at the outcome of the molding process and to have regarded the resultant sketches as working documents, not final interpretations (Alexandra Pesch, pers. comm., October 1, 2020).
53John Moreland, Archaeology and Text (London, 2001), and Neil Price, “What’s in a Name? An Archaeological Identity Crisis for the Norse Gods (and Some of Their Friends),” in Old Norse Religion in Long-Term Perspectives: Origins, Changes, and Interactions: An International Conference in Lund, Sweden, June 3–7, 2004, ed. Anders Andrén, Kristina Jennbert, and Catharina Raudvere, Vägar till Midgård 8 (Lund, 2006), 179–83.
54Rowe, Vikings in the West, and McTurk, Studies in Ragnars saga.
55Orms þáttr, ed. Þórhallur Vilmundarson and Bjarni Vilhjálmsson, 409–14. Like the blood eagle, the “fatal walk” is a method of tortuous execution of dubious historicity. The victim is eviscerated, has their intestines fastened to a pole or stake, and is made to walk around it, drawing their viscera still further out until they expire. On its development and use as a literary motif, see John Frankis, “From Saint’s Life to Saga: The Fatal Walk of Alfred Ætheling, Saint Amphibalus and the Viking Bróðir,” Saga-Book of the Viking Society 25 (1998–2001): 121–37. Any historical attempt to perform the fatal walk would have resulted in a very quick death: human viscera are anchored to the posterior part of the abdomen, which would have to be cut away in order to draw out the contents. While small segments can be mobilized separately and most of the intestines brought to the body’s surface, significant cuts would be required to allow their unwinding. This would swiftly result in death via exsanguination, and would not allow the victim to stand up and move around.
56Uppsala, Uppsala University Library, MS Isl. R: 702 4to (late sixteenth or early seventeenth century) and Specimen lexici runici (1650) describe Einarr Jarl performing the deed himself, while Copenhagen, Den Arnamagnæanske Samling / The Arnamagnæan Institute, MS AM 332 4to (late seventeenth century) and Flateyjarbók (late fourteenth century) employ a passive construction implying he had it arranged. See further Orkneyinga Saga: Udgivet for Samfund til udgivelse af gammel nordisk litteratur, ed. Sigurður Nordal, Samfund til udgivelse af gammel Nordisk litteratur 40 (Copenhagen, 1913–16), 12.
57Ragnarssona þáttr, ed. Guðni Jónsson and Bjarni Vilhjálmsson, 1:158: “[l]étu þeir nú rista örn á baki Ellu.”
58Stefan Brink, “Political and Social Structures in Early Scandinavia: A Settlement-Historical Pre-Study of the Central Place,” Tor 28 (1996): 235–81; Stefan Brink, “Political and Social Structures in Early Scandinavia II: Aspects of Space and Territoriality—The Settlement District,” Tor 29 (1997): 389–437; and Stefan Brink, “Social Order in the Early Scandinavian Landscape,” in Settlement and Landscape: Proceedings of a Conference in Århus, Denmark, May 4–7 1998, ed. Charlotte Fabech and Jytte Ringtved (Højbjerg, 1999), 423–39.
59Lotte Hedeager, “Scandinavia before the Viking Age,” in The Viking World, ed. Stefan Brink and Neil Price (London, 2008), 11–22, at 15, and Terje Gansum, “Role the Bones—from Iron to Steel,” Norwegian Archaeological Review 37 (2004): 41–57.
60Joakim Goldhahn and Terje Oestigaard, “Smith and Death—Cremations in Furnaces in Bronze and Iron Age Scandinavia,” in Facets of Archaeology: Essays in Honour of Lotte Hedeager on Her 60th Birthday, ed. Konstantinos Chilidis, Julie Lund, and Christopher Prescott, Oslo Archaeological Series 10 (Oslo, 2008), 215–41; on artisans as ritual specialists in the Nordic Bronze and Iron Ages generally, see Joakim Goldhahn and Terje Østigård, Rituelle spesialister i bronse- og jernalderen, 2 vols., Gotarc Serie C Arkeologiska Skrifter 65 (Göteborg, 2007). Cf. Anna Hed Jakobsson, Smältdeglars härskare och Jerusalems tillskyndare: Berättelser om vikingatid och tidig medeltid, Stockholm Studies in Archaeology 25 (Stockholm, 2003).
61Ragnars saga, ed. Guðni Jónsson and Bjarni Vilhjálmsson, 1:143: “Nú skal sá maðr, er oddhagastr er, marka örn á baki honum sem inniligast.”
62Richard Cleasby and Gudbrand Vigfusson, An Icelandic-English Dictionary: Based on the Ms. Collections of the Late Richard Cleasby (Oxford, 1874), 462.
63Jan Aksel Harder Klitgaard, “In Search of Askr Yggdrasill: A Phenomenological Approach to the Role of Trees in Old Nordic Religions” (MA thesis, University of Iceland, 2018). Cf. Michael D. J. Bintley, Trees in the Religions of Early Medieval England, Anglo-Saxon Studies 26 (Woodbridge, UK, 2015).
64Caroline Arcini, “The Vikings Bare Their Filed Teeth,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 128/4 (2005): 727–33, and Leszek Gardeła, “Entangled Worlds: Archaeologies of Ambivalence in the Viking Age,” 2 vols. (PhD diss., University of Aberdeen, 2012), 1:71–74.
65On ritual specialists in the pre-Christian Nordic region more generally, see Olof Sundqvist, Kultledare i fornskandinavisk religion, Occasional Papers in Archaeology 41 (Uppsala, 2007).
66Páls saga is a Christian biography of Páll Jónsson (1155–1211), who was bishop of the Icelandic see of Skálholt (1195–1211). Traditionally grouped with other, more hagiographic bishops’ sagas, recent scholarship has instead stressed its links to current events in Iceland and the samtíðasögur (“contemporary sagas”); Margaret Cormack, “Christian Biography,” in A Companion to Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and Culture, ed. McTurk, 27–42, at 27–28. The saga was likely composed very soon after the events it depicts, by a writer with direct experience of the people and places the text describes, suggesting that the artisan Margaret hin haga [the skillful] was a historical figure, and that her nickname and reputation were widely known in thirteenth-century Iceland; Paul Bibire, “Páls saga biskups,” in Medieval Scandinavia: An Encyclopedia, ed. Phillip Pulsiano et al., Garland Encyclopedias of the Middle Ages 1 (New York, 1993), 496. The text describes the crozier as “gioruann so hagliga ad eingi madur hafdi fyrr sied jaffnvel gioruann ä Jslandi er smydad hafdi Margret hin haga, er þa var oddhogust allra manna a Jslandi” [made so skillfully that no one had seen its equal made in Iceland before, (and) which was made by Margaret the skillful, who was then the most skilled with a point of everyone in Iceland]; Páls saga byskups, ed. Ásdís Egilsdóttir, Biskupa sögur, 3 vols., Íslenzk fornrit 16 (Reykjavík, 1998–2003), 2:431, and translated in Origines Islandicae: A Collection of the More Important Sagas and Other Native Writings Relating to the Settlement and Early History of Iceland, trans. Gudbrand Vigfusson and F. York Powell (Oxford, 1905), 2:502–34, 528.
67Orkneyinga saga, ed. Finnbogi Guðmundsson, 13; de Vries, Altgermanische Religionsgeschichte, 1:411–12; Smyth, Scandinavian Kings in the British Isles, 189–94; and af Edholm, “Att rista blodörn.”
68On the tensions between mechanical and ritual (or ritualized) behavior, see generally Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (Oxford, 1997); Ronald L. Grimes, “Religion, Ritual, and Performance,” in Religion, Theatre, and Performance: Acts of Faith, ed. Lance Gharavi, Routledge Advances in Theatre and Performance Studies 22 (New York, 2011), 27–41; and Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern, Ritual: Key Concepts in Religion (London, 2014).
69Tom Hellers, “Valknútr”: Das Dreiecksymbol der Wikingerzeit, Studia Medievalia Septentrionalia 19 (Vienna, 2012).
70Folke Ström, On the Sacral Origin of the Germanic Death Penalties, Vitterhets Historie och Antikvitets-Akademien Stockholm Handlingar 52 (Lund, 1942); Aldhouse-Green, Dying for the Gods; Aleks Pluskowski, “The Sacred Gallows: Sacrificial Hanging to Óðinn,” Archaeological Review from Cambridge 17/2 (2000): 55–81; and Klas af Edholm, “Människooffer i fornnordisk religion: En diskussion utifrån arkeologiskt material och källtexter,” Chaos: Skandinavisk tidsskrift for religionshistoriske studier 65 (2016): 125–48.
71Ragnarssona þáttr, ed. Guðni Jónsson and Bjarni Vilhjálmsson, 1:158.
72de Vries, Altgermanische Religionsgeschichte, 1:411: “Vaterrache.”
73Mary Bradbury, “The Good Death?,” in Death, Dying and Bereavement, ed. Donna Dickenson, Malcom Johnson, and Jeanne Samson Katz, 2nd ed. (London, 2000), 59–63, at 59. See also Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry, eds., Death and the Regeneration of Life (New York, 1982), and Phyllis Palgi and Henry Abramovitch, “Death: A Cross-Cultural Perspective,” Annual Review of Anthropology 13 (1984): 385–417.
74Saxo Grammaticus, Gesta Danorum 9.4.38–39, ed. Friis-Jensen, trans. Fisher, 1:660–62.
75Ragnars saga, ed. Guðni Jónsson and Bjarni Vilhjálmsson, 1:134–35, and Ragnarssona þáttr, ed. Guðni Jónsson and Bjarni Vilhjálmsson, 1:134–35.
76Snorri Sturluson, Haralds saga, ed. Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson, 1:130. Orkneyinga saga, ed. Finnbogi Guðmundsson, 12, notes Rǫgnvaldr’s death at Háfldan’s hands, but not the method.
77Orms þáttr, ed. Þórhallur Vilmundarson and Bjarni Vilhjálmsson, 410–14.
78Norna-Gests þáttr, ed. Guðni Jónsson and Bjarni Vilhjálmsson, 1:157. Reginsmál, as part of a complex cycle of interconnected poems covering several generations of heroes, makes no explicit mention of Sigmundr’s death.
79Keith Ruiter and Steven Ashby’s recent study on judicial violence in early medieval Europe observed that hanging, despite (or due to) its association with Óðinn in many sources, appears to have been regarded as a particularly shameful death in early medieval Gotland; “Different Strokes: Judicial Violence in Viking-Age England and Scandinavia,” Viking and Medieval Scandinavia 14 (2018): 153–84.
80Roy A. Rappaport, “The Obvious Aspects of Ritual,” in Ecology, Meaning, and Religion (Berkeley, 1979), 173–217.
81It might be worth noting in this context that the thirteenth-century Norwegian law code, Gulatingslov, lists the use of a krocoro or krocſspiote [hook, barb; hooked, barbed spear] among several other misſvigi [indirect killings]: “þat er hít þriðia miſvígí ef maðr er loſten krocoro. æða krocſpiote. oc þarf at ſkera stil” [that is the third type of indirect killing, if a man is struck with a barb or barbed spear, and it must be cut out]; Den Eldre Gulatingslova, ed. Bjørn Eithun, Magnus Rindal, and Tor Ulset, Norrøne Tekster 6 (Oslo, 1994), 138. Cf. Orkisz, “Pole-Weapons in the Sagas of Icelanders,” 200. Presumably an unbarbed spear would still have caused a wound but not required the surgical removal of the barbed head, for which the Gulatingslov holds the attacker liable, suggesting that some types of wounds—and deaths—were more permissible than others.
82Norna-Gests þáttr, ed. Guðni Jónsson and Bjarni Vilhjálmsson, 1:179: “dó Lyngvi með mikilli hreysti.”
83Consider, for example, the repeated urgings to silence and restraint in strophes 6–7, 15, and 27 of Hávamál (ed. Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, 1:323–27), and translated in The Poetic Edda, trans. Larrington, 14–38. Cf. John Lindow, Comitatus, Individual and Honor: Studies in North Germanic Institutional Vocabulary, University of California Publications in Linguistics 83 (Berkeley, 1976), and William Ian Miller, Humiliation: And Other Essays on Honor, Social Discomfort, and Violence (Ithaca, NY, 1993), for the famous death of Gunnarr Gjúkason, who, bound and thrown into a snake pit to die, signals his noble background and character by playing the harp (e.g., Atlamál hin groenlenzku, ed. Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, Eddukvæði, 2:394), and translated in The Poetic Edda, trans. Larrington, 217–33. Cf. Aðalheiður Guðmundsdóttir, “Saga Motifs on Gotland Picture Stones.”
84Orms þáttr, ed. Þórhallur Vilmundarson and Bjarni Vilhjálmsson, 418: “lét svá líf sitt með litlum drengskap.”
85Frands Herschend, The Idea of the Good in Late Iron Age Society, Occasional Papers in Archeology 15 (Uppsala, 1998), and Tommy Kuusela, “‘Hallen var lyst i helig frid’: Krig och fred mellan gudar och jättar i en fornnordisk hallmiljö” (PhD diss., Stockholm University, 2017).
86af Edholm, “Att rista blodörn,” 30.
87Neil Price, “Dying and the Dead: Viking Age Mortuary Behaviour,” in The Viking World, ed. Brink and Price, 257–73, and Neil Price, “Passing into Poetry: Viking-Age Mortuary Drama and the Origins of Norse Mythology,” Medieval Archaeology 54 (2010): 123–56.
88Ibn Fadlān, Risāla, ed. James E. Montgomery, “Ibn Fadlān and the Rūsiyyah,” Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies 3 (2000): 1–25, at 14–19, and Snorri Sturluson, Gylfaginning, ed. Anthony Faulkes, Edda: Prologue and Gylfaginning, 2nd ed. (London, 2005), 46, translated in Snorri Sturluson, Edda, ed. and trans. Anthony Faulkes, 3rd ed. (London, 1988), 7–58.
89Magistri Adam Bremensis Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum 4.27, ed. Bernhard Schmeidler, 3rd ed. (Hanover, 1917), 260, and translated in Adam of Bremen, History of the Archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen, trans. Francis J. Tschan (New York, 2002).
90Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar, ed. Sigurður Nordal, Íslenzk Fornrit 2 (Reykjavík, 1933), 171, and translated in The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, including 49 Tales, ed. Viðar Hreinsson et al., vol. 1, trans. Bernard Scudder (Reykjavík, 1997), 33–177.
91Ibrāhīm ibn Ya’qūb al-Isrā’īlī al-Turṭushi, in Georg Jacob, ed., Arabische Berichte von Gesandten an germanische Fürstenhöfe aus dem 9. und 10. Jahrhundert, Quellen zur deutschen Volkskunde 1 (Berlin, 1927), 29; only fragments exist and there is no English translation of which we are aware.
92Edeltraud Aspöck, “What Actually Is a ‘Deviant Burial’? Comparing German-Language and Anglophone Research on ‘Deviant Burials,’” in Deviant Burial in the Archaeological Record, ed. Eileen M. Murphy, Studies in Funerary Archaeology 2 (Oxford, 2008), 17–34; Leszek Gardeła, “The Dangerous Dead? Rethinking Viking-Age Deviant Burials,” in Conversions: Looking for Ideological Change in the Early Middle Ages, ed. Leszek Paweł Słupecki and Rudolf Simek, Studia Medievalia Septentrionalia 23 (Vienna, 2013), 99–136; and Amelie Alterauge et al., “Between Belief and Fear— Reinterpreting Prone Burials during the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period in German-Speaking Europe,” PLoS ONE 15 (2020): 1–33 e0238439.
93Fredrik Svanberg, Decolonizing the Viking Age, 2 vols., Acta Archaeologica Lundensia Series in 8° 43 and Series in 4° 24 (Stockholm, 2003); Eva S. Thäte, Monuments and Minds: Monument Re-use in Scandinavia in the Second Half of the First Millennium AD, Acta Archaeologica Lundensia Series in 4° 27 (Lund, 2007); Gardeła, “Entangled Worlds”; and Gardeła, “The Dangerous Dead?”
94Holger Arbman, Birka: Untersuchungen und Studien, vol. 1, Die Gräber: Tafeln (Stockholm, 1940), 384.
95Gardeła, “The Dangerous Dead?,” 107–8.
96As some medieval sources suggest that a blood eagle could constitute only superficial modifications to soft tissue, it is not impossible that archaeologists have already excavated the remains of a blood eagle victim without being able to recognize them as such—a potential case of “invisible deviance,” where deviant mortuary practices do not result in recognizably deviant remains; Gardeła, “Entangled Worlds,” 1:71, and “The Dangerous Dead?,” 120–22.
97Cf. Smyth, Scandinavian Kings, 214–23.
98Svanberg, Decolonizing the Viking Age.
99Andreas Nordberg, Krigarna i Odins sal: Dödsföreställningar och krigarkult i fornnordisk religion, 2nd ed. (Stockholm, 2004), and Luke John Murphy, “Between Unity and Diversity: Articulating Pre-Christian Nordic Religion and Its Spaces in the Late Iron Age” (PhD diss., Aarhus University, 2017).
100Svanberg, Decolonizing the Viking Age, 1:186.
101Nordberg, Krigarna i Odins sal; Sundqvist, Kultledare i fornskandinavisk religion; contrast the model of non-elite religions developed in Luke John Murphy, “Paganism at Home: Pre-Christian Private Praxis and Household Religion in the Iron-Age North,” Scripta Islandica 69 (2018): 49–97.
102È. A. Makaev, John Meredig, and Elmer Antonsen, The Language of the Oldest Runic Inscriptions: A Linguistic and Historical-Philological Analysis, trans. John Meredig and Elmer H. Antonsen, Kungl. vitterhets historie och antikvitets akademiens handlingar filologisk-filosofiska 21 (Stockholm, 1996), 23–48.
103Herschend, The Idea of the Good.
104Ruiter and Ashby, “Different Strokes.”
105Till Mostowlansky and Andrea Rota, “A Matter of Perspective? Disentangling the Emic–Etic Debate in the Scientific Study of Religion\s,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 28 (2016): 317–36, at 323; on the emic/etic debate in scholarship on the Viking Age, see further Luke John Murphy, “Towards a Phrasebook of Methodology in Viking Studies: A Perspective from the Study of Religion,” Retrospective Methods Network Newsletter 15 (2021).
106On the development of Hel as both a hostile mythological figure and a negative afterlife destination in pre-Christian Scandinavia, see Christopher Abram, “Hel in Early Norse Poetry,” Viking and Medieval Scandinavia 2 (2006): 1–29. On Valhöll as a form of warrior’s paradise associated with Óðinn worship and elite martial culture, see Edith Marold, “Das Walhallbild in den Eiríksmál und den Hákonarmál,” Mediaeval Scandinavia 5 (1972): 19–33; Anders Hultgård, “Ragnarök and Valhalla: Eschatological Beliefs among the Scandinavians of the Viking Period,” in The Twelfth Viking Congress: Developments around the Baltic and the North Sea in the Viking Age, ed. Björn Ambrosiani and Helen Clarke, Birka Studies 3 (Stockholm, 1994), 288–93; Nordberg, Krigarna i Odins sal; and Hultgård, “Óðinn, Valhǫll and the Einherjar: Eschatological Myth and Ideology in the Late Viking Period,” in Ideology and Power in the Viking and Middle Ages: Scandinavia, Iceland, Ireland, Orkney and the Faeroes, ed. Gro Steinsland et al., Northern World 52 (Leiden, 2011), 297–328.
107On so-called suttee in the Iron-Age Nordic region, see Haakon Shetelig, “Traces of the Custom of Suttee in Norway during the Viking Age,” Saga-Book of the Viking Club 6 (1908–9): 180–208, and Hilda Roderick Ellis, The Road to Hel: A Study of the Conception of the Dead in Old Norse Literature (New York, 1968), 50–58. On slavery in the Viking Age, see Ruth Mazo Karras, Slavery and Society in Medieval Scandinavia, Yale Historical Publications 135 (New Haven, 1988); Stefan Brink, “Slavery in the Viking Age,” in The Viking World, ed. Brink and Price, 49–56; and Stefan Brink, Vikingarnas slavar: Den Nordiska träldomen under yngre järnålder och äldsta medeltid (Stockholm, 2018).
108On the practice of víglýsing [lit. killing-declaration], which differentiated morð [murder] from víg [manslaughter, killing], see further Dieter Strauch, “Víglysing und Lysing,” in Germanische Altertumskunde Online, ed. Sebastian Brather, Wilhelm Heizmann, and Steffen Patzold, Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde 32 (Berlin, 2006), 364–71.
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