A gruesome post

So, I'm late in getting around to watching it, but am currently going through the 3rd season of the Norwegian Viking comedy Norsemen on Netflix.

I've posted about this series before - the show is very funny in an occasionally violent Scandinavian Monty-Python-does-history kind of way.  One of the things that I find continually funny is just the way they speak their English - it's like the rhythm itself is amusing.    (Is this the way Norwegian itself sounds?  I really don't know.)

Anyway, in this season, there is a Viking wedding which features one of the violent bits (although, as usual, done in such an over the top way it's not offending me) - the sacrifice of a slave.

This has caused me to Google whether this actually happened much, and I can't for the moment see any confirmation of this.  Animal sacrifice, yes, but slave sacrifice is usually mentioned in the context of funerals, not weddings.

However, in reading about violent Norse habits, I did come across discussion of the "blood eagle" as a method of extremely gruesome execution.   I see that people who have watched Vikings, or played bloody video games, know all about this, but it was new to me.  I almost wish I didn't know:

Particularly infamous is the so-called “blood eagle”, a gory ritual these warriors are said to have performed on their most hated enemies. The ritual allegedly involved carving the victim’s back open and cutting their ribs away from their spine, before the lungs were pulled out through the resulting wounds. The final fluttering of the lungs splayed out on the outspread ribs would supposedly resemble the movement of a bird’s wings – hence the eagle in the name. 

I see that it is questioned whether it was real:

For decades, researchers have dismissed the blood eagle as a legend. No archaeological evidence of the ritual has ever been found, and the Vikings themselves kept no records, listing their achievements only in spoken poetry and sagas that were first written down centuries later. So the bloody rite has been rejected as improbable, resulting from repeated misunderstandings of complex poetry and a desire by Christian writers to paint their Nordic attackers as barbaric heathens. 

However, our new study, takes an entirely new approach on the matter. Our team, made up of medical scientists and a historian, bypassed the long-standing question of “did the blood eagle ever really happen?”, asking instead: “Could it have been done?” Our answer is a clear yes.

I can think of better things to study...