Blood hair

The Blutaar or blood Adler ( altnordisch blóðörn ) was a putative form of execution in the Viking .

The back of the living victim was cut open, the ribs on both sides separated from the spine and - like eagle wings - folded to the side. Some suggest that the lungs were still pulled out. However, the version is rejected by other scientists, since the lungs would collapse in seconds after such a violent opening. They assume that the shoulder blades were also folded up.

The Blutaar is well documented in various sagas , skaldic poems and Edda songs as revenge against enemies, for example in the Orkneyinga saga or the Reginsmál . The Ragnarssona þáttr reports that the Danish king Ragnar Lodbrok , who had invaded England, was defeated by King Ælle and executed in a snake pit. Ragnar's sons later subjugated Æle and killed him by cutting a blood eagle.

However, the background of the ritual is just as controversial as the question of whether it was actually practiced or whether it was perhaps just a particularly cruel-looking literary decoration to entertain the audience. At least that's how Scandinavian Roberta Frank argues . Other interpretations see in Blutaar the further development of an original human sacrifice to the god Odin or a special form of revenge that sons carried out on their father's murderer.

“As Frank has convincingly explained, however, the motif 'scratching the blood eagle' is based - at least in the case of Ella - on the misunderstanding of a stanza from Sigvatr's Knútsdrápa (11th century) in which it says of Ella's killing: 'And Ívarr, who sat in York had Ella's back cut by an eagle '(Knútsdrápa 1; see below and cf. Frank 1984, 334–339); While other researchers consider Sigvatr's stanza as a second evidence - next to Reginsmál 26 - for the blood eagle motif in poetry, Frank [an Edda researcher] sees Sigvatr's stanza as one of the extraordinarily numerous examples of the motif 'Vogel der Walstatt (eagle, raven ) tears the fallen warrior with his claws or his beak ', more precisely:' the victorious warrior lets the birds of the whale tear the fallen 'or something similar. (cf. Frank 1984, 337–339; Frank 1988; Frank 1990). "

- Klaus von See : Edda commentary on the Reginsmál (Heidelberg, 2006)

supporting documents

1. ^ Roberta Frank: Viking Atrocity and Skaldic Verse. The Rite of the Blood-Eagle. In: The English Historical Review 99 (1984), No. 391, pp. 332-343.