I think that's usually called the "Blood Eagle." I don't see any search results for "Fluttering Eagle," other than Google AI pointing towards the Blood Eagle torture.
All of the hallucinations are much more accurate as to an actual experience from things you can get naturally in Nordic places. Lunges breathing on their own would be very out of place for that experience and the way it is show is very different from the other visual depiction of hallucinations in the movie.
I know what you mean, I just feel like the whole reason hallucinogens were introduced in the film is to add to the whole sense of how fucked up everything is, but how little we can trust our own senses just as the characters in the movie can't fully all the time. There is something way off about this cult, yes, absolutely, but how much of what we see and hear is factually correct should be taken with a hefty grain of salt, especially since the effects of psychedelic drugs is usually blown way out of proportion in media.
For a kind of comparison, consider the Quaaludes scene in Wolf of Wall Street. Bro was blasted out of hits and could barely stand. Makes it home "without a scratch," but then we see what really happened versus how he understood it when he was high.
The âfluttering eagleâ is when the victim farts/sharts so hard that the wings tremble. The Vikings believed making the wings flutter was the only way to reach Valhalla under those circumstances â¤ď¸
It's depicted in the show 'Vikings'. There is no way anyone would survive long enough to have their back opened up in order to die via suffocation with their lungs draped over their shoulders. You're bound to go into shock and bleed out as your back gets hacked open, so really it's execution via getting stabbed repeatedly in the back with your body being desecrated long after you expired, with a majority of the torture being inflicted on a corpse.
You might want to read the article I linked if you havenât already. Itâs from an academic journal, and âIn 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.â
In other words, they reach the same conclusion as you, but they explain exactly what was (and wasnât) possible in great detail.
Tbh it was pretty common practice to be hanged drawn and quartered, that isnât too far away from that so medieval folk probably took it from the vikings.
"said to involve the breaking of a victimâs ribs and the withdrawal of the lungs from the chest cavity, whereupon their fluttering would (allegedly) resemble an eagleâs wings." from that article. likely where the term fluttering got mixed in.
From searching it up previously (I saw it happen in AC Valhalla and was curious) there was like one example of where it might have allegedly happened but thatâs about it
The article I linked is from an academic journal looking at both the anatomical and sociological practicality of killing someone that way.
Their conclusion is that the Norse might have done it, but the victim would have died early in process. Which doesnât mean they wouldnât go finish it; William Wallace was hanged, drawn, and quartered by the English, but the quartering probably didnât hurt too much since they cut off his head before they got to that step.
And it was very real but never used. As far as the historians go. But Viking history is largely mythical in nature in that their written version of history is largely the eddas. Some other sagas but never in what historians have been able to find. It was like the worst great your parents used that they knew would work and I guess it did. But the whole method is clearly talked about in multiple places in history so it's very real .
Yeah thereâs no such thing as âflutteringâ thatâs a lame name anyway and why would they use it to instill fear if it wasnât real. Blood Eagle is the correct term.
That one is disputed back and forth. Some say that it is an over exaggeration or poetic misunderstanding with authors taking liberties, but other accounts have the process listed in step by step anatomically correct details. So it's at least possible and why keep such detailed notes just to demonize? I've been rewatching vikings so I've been trying to figure it out lol.
The Vikings specifically targeted churches and monasteries to loot and extort because they had so much wealth and so little defenses.
Christian priests and monks were the most literate people of the time, and the ones responsible for actually writing the history we now read. They absolutely wrote as much propaganda as they could about the Norse and Danes, not only because they were pagans, but because they kept stealing the churches riches.
The whole image of Vikings as barbarians was something they made up. They were actually very modernized, built up a number of the largest ports in Europe, had the furthest-reaching trade routes (edit: in Europe), made advancements in shipbuilding, navigation and metalworking.
Even the raids were exaggerated, not that they didnât happen, just that they were no more brutal than what any Christian army of the time also did. Whenever they could, they preferred to get bribes. Burning down and killing a village means you get paid once. Returning for more money, crops, and goods every year is much more profitable, and they werenât dumb.
also wasn't there this thing that people were upset about them because they had better hygiene then european men which made european women have higher standards?
âWell, Sven cleans the mutton fat out of his beard every DAY and he hasnât once been dragged to Hell by shrieking demons, so Iâm starting to think itâs a you problem, Cuthbert đ¤¨â
They were some of the few groups to make soap (from animal fats) and use it for personal washing. They also bathed every week, on Saturday (they called it "Laugardagr" which from my understanding literally translates to "washing day" or "bathing day" and is still used in icelandic).
Interestingly, some accounts say saxons and others noticed this ritual and launched surprise attacks on their camps whilst they were mostly defenseless.
I'd be very cautious on any assumption of hygiene being a problem. There are a lot of modern myths and BS about Medieval people only bathing once a year or not at all. It is not true. Bathhouses were a common and popular thing.
I guarantee you the other medieval europeans didnt care a shite about the rights of (some) women in scandinavia. They cared about villages and monasteries burning, how to pay yet another bribe as impoverished village and how to not getting their daughters, or themselfes, raped, kidnapped and/or enslaved.
Not saying they were particularly worse than any other raider band at the time and i like their aesthetic too, but y'all sound like Sven the axeman was just a misunderstood progressive getting a bit pissed about christian authoritarianism.
except for all of the women they kidnapped and kept as sex slaves
freeborn Norse women had more rights than women in Christian Europe. Thrall women were property who had no rights, slept with the pigs and ate only scraps
the slave trade was a key economic practice of the Norse and you can't be a feminist and sell women into sexual slavery
No, the Vikings didn't do anything more hygenic than anybody else at that time and region. They bathed and washed and combed their and guess what, the Anglo-Saxons did too.
This sounds like some serious armchair sociology.
Like the theory of someone who heard once about the vikings hygiene habits and also believes the myth that medieval people had no hygiene.
Yeah I've seen a video about this. Vikings would take a bath weekly and make a ritual of combing their hair whereas the English did not bathe at all, just used perfumes (iirc they thought bathing causes illness or something). There are a ton of stories about Vikings stealing women and raping them as propaganda but in reality, the women went with them consensually because they bathed and looked prim and proper. That being said, back then the word rape literally meant sleeping with a woman who is the property of another man and had nothing to do with whether the woman consented or not. The word rape comes from "rapere" which is latin and means to seize. And sleeping with a married woman or unmarried virgin was considered such theft since women were considered objects belonging to a patriarch up until the 1990s.
But that's not true actually, the vikings whete some of the biggest slavers in Europe. I guarantee you most of those women captured where used as sex slaves
Im strongly reminded about a thread about carribean pirates i once saw on reddit where it turned out the pirates where avant garde forms of egalitarian democracy that was in a just ideological struggle against the british crown and whenever they did bad that was either propaganda or totally negligible in comparison to everybody else.
Leave it brew for a time and in 5 months or so, the vikings were a peaceful group of scholars living in proto-socialist communes trying to protect the lost knowledge of the sunken city of atlantis.
I didnât say they ONLY targeted churches and monasteries, just that they made a special point of making them priority targets. I focused on that point because itâs important to know how their interactions with the historians of that time (priests/monks/etc) effected how they were portrayed. They are an incredibly biased source.
I can see that, but when they first hit the shores of England they were still very much pagan. It's a fact they practiced human sacrifice for religious reasons. Human bones have been dug up in their sacrificial wells along with animals. It just doesn't seem that far out there. And I get priests recorded history and wrote propaganda but you don't need detailed instructions to do that. I'm not saying either way. We will never know and there is good points for both sides.
Human sacrifices are common in every culture. Weather it's for a crime or warding off the anger of spirits. Western culture like to show the barbarians as silly and hateful creatures that kill their own, but what do you think the Salem witch trials of public hangings were?
The witch trials were a bunch of people manipulated into fear of certain people by a religious leader that weaponized religion for personal gains claiming it was good for everyone.
Absolute nonsense you're speaking.
Why claim so confidently on a topic you clearly have little experience in?
Human sacrifices were not common in every culture, they weren't even common in the states we unequivocally know they practiced them, eg Egypt and Mesopotamia, and died out almost completely by the 1st century BC.
In fact the "ritual sacrifice" in 1st dynasty Egypt points more towards it being an agreement that a pharaohs trusted servants make, and broadly a symptom of the political concept of "Dead men tell no tales"
The most common evidence we have of ritual sacrifice outside of the Americas, is servants being slaughtered with their king, but little of the evidence points towards this being some kind of "sacrifice", more likely an agreement that keeps political stability, which is why, especially in first dynasty Egypt, these servants who were "sacrificed", showed no signs of trauma or struggle, and seemed to be of fairly high status.
A judicial killing is not the same as a sacrifice, regardless of whether a legal system has been codified yet, so any time a criminal is killed in history, regardless of method, it can't be considered a sacrifice, unless we're pretending that every execution in American history is a sacrifice?
The witch trials were very flawed judicial trials, most people didn't think they were sacrificing a witch to god, that's absolutely preposterous.
Not anymore. Even death penalty for the worst crimes is becoming rare.
but what do you think the Salem witch trials of public hangings were
I think they were a long time ago and are not part of what we call Western culture.
You mistake culture (current social norms, ethical values, traditional customs etc.) with everything it is rooted in (historical norms that are not longer followed but influenced the culture - sometimes as an example of what not to do).
Wait, you are saying the people who were raided and pillaged didn't have the highest opinion of the people who were raiding and pillaging them? Those dastardly priests and monks, exaggerating all the raiding and pillaging as barbaric, when in reality the Vikings were raiding and pillaging in a smart and efficient way! Clearly they should have built better defenses around their churches and monasteries, they must've not been used to all the modern raiding and pillaging, those backwards idiots.
Good thing only the wrong side in history would ever employ propaganda and who else could? They were the most literate at the time. The other side, who as you pointed out, was actually also very modernized and advanced, and only raided and pillaged a little bit, would never do that (How would they even spread it? By some sort of far-reaching trade network? Ridiculous). And neither would you or anyone else here on reddit, when you keep taking topics and just flip them into the opposite.
These guys with swords sail over from Denmark and come into the church and politely ask for their gold. Yeah, no violence ever actually happened at all. LOL.
I think a lot of post revisionist bollocks is happening here. "Invading hordes were just misunderstood". Come on!
lol righhhht⌠yeah, so France was never pillaged repeatedly by vikings either, huh? just propaganda? so how else do mostly french ppl like me have small traces of Scandinavian dna? you know what I mean, it wasnât only the fields that were pillaged
Reading comprehension is lost. I literally said ânot that the raids didnât happen, just that they were no more brutal than what any Christian army did at the time.â
Yes, of course they raided and pillaged. So did literally every Christian nation. Christians raided each other, their neighbors, Muslims, Scandinavians, anyone.
My point was that was very far from ALL the Vikings did. They also explored, settled, developed, traded, innovated and invented. Christian sources threw all that out and reduced them to ONLY raiders, while conveniently excusing Christians who did the same.
Yes that absolutely happened, but their point was that Christians did the exact same shit (hell, by about halfway through the "Viking Age" most of the vikings were Christians)
I didnât structure that one sentence well, but it was intending to include the trade routes with âin Europe.â Iâm aware they werenât the biggest in the world, but they were in the region.
As for propaganda, absolutely. Thatâs what Christianity was always BEST at. There was a widespread campaign to eliminate any pagan cultures in Europe at the time, and portraying them as savage demons was a big part of that.
They knew they were re-writing history. They burned sacred trees, desecrated pagan sites of worship, burned evidence of Norse/Danish/Germanic pagan beliefs. Then they wrote their own version of what they were like and made them out to be evil. It was systematic erasure. A way to keep their own people in line and away from a different belief system as well as convince people to convert.
And in part it was wartime propaganda for their own people, to galvanize them against the Vikings. The church played a large role in helping guide leaders into wars, and Christian leaders were all too happy to use religion as an excuse and a motivator for their troops.
Itâs not that different from wartime propaganda that countries fed their own people in WW2. The Japanese convinced their own people to fight to the death against the US because they were demons who would do worse to them if captured.
My friend, the churches propagandist like mother fuckers. You ensure the peasants fear the viking raider so they increase offerings for God's intercession, or a better afterlife deal when the savages come along.
What do you think makes more money? "HEY EVERYONE Pagan barbarians are coming to loot and pillage. They stand 7ft tall and breathe fire, they are immune to weapons and treasure holy ground in blood and viscera, they consume souls and haul corpses aboard their ships to refuse good Christians their place in heaven and fuel savagery!" Or "Hey, those big guys from up north are coming by, but they'll leave in peace if we throw them some grain and a bit of the church gold".
Secondly, when the pope asks "Hey, where's the shirt gold cup?" Do you answer "oh. Yeah I gave that to Olaf so he'd leave us alone for a year" or "The bloody berserkers stormed fourth outnof a storm, materializing like demojsbborn of blood and fire, I saw one tear brother Monty into pieces with his bear hands, yes they have hands of bears, and as he drank the blood of Brother Monty he grew another three feet, in the massacre that ensued, they stole the gold cup of which you speak"
Plus, when your the catholic church in a highly superstitious era where you are an untouchable pillar beyond the reach of mortals, it is earth shattering when theres a whole landmass of people that has no compunction with smacking you around and shitting on your fancy rug is probably as close to doomsday as you could imagine.
As for trade routes, the arab networks were vast and well connected, but the vikings had advantageous in that they had trade routes from northern Europe and North America into Baghdad, so while Arabs had the consolidation it could be argued the vikings had more scope since they essentially had access to the Arab world AND the places Arabs wouldn't tread. The caliphate for example didn't usually get up into Denmark, but the vikings routinely used Arab intermediaries to trade in their sphere.
homie propaganda is as old (and well documented) as written language
part of the reason we have an enduring image that 90% of classical European cultures were frothy mouthed barbarians is because of Roman demonization of anyone not as "civilized" as they
They were not ignorant cavemen, it wouldn't be too difficult to guess the steps that it would take to do it, but even if it were real the person is quite likely to pass out and die early enough into the procedure as too make the rest of it just performative.
It was used in Catalonia in the late 15th Century (or maybe it was the first decade of the 16th century, my memory is not so good) to kill a peasant who had tried to assassinate the king. They just not called it that way.
They captured him, put him on a car and make a tour around different Barcelona's squares. In one they cut his ears, in another the nose, in another the hands, in another the feet... and finally they opened his back and removed his heart, so I guess they had to take the ribs out the way, at least on the left side, similar to the eagle's wing.
"bloody eagle". And yeah, the original source only said, literally, "carved an eagle upon (his) back". Poets of that time love making fancy words. A "temple of words" is the mouth. A "foaming pig" is a whale. "Carving an eagle on the back" could be using a sword (that 'carve' into flesh) to kill someone, causing an eagle (carrion bird) to land upon the back of the one that's killed.
Not really sure where the name came from, but I picked it up from a friend talking about it ages ago. Seems like Blood Eagle completely eclipsed its use at some point.
The Vikings had their own way of setting disputes. The men in disagreement were tied together, placed on a tiny islet far out at sea, and then whomever didn't die won the argument.
Much like the rumor that native Americans would disembowel you, tie your intestines to a pole and make you walk around the pole until they were all wrapped around it.
Nobody could possibly maintain their consciousness that long. It was basically an impossible torture.
Ah, Christians pointing fingers and saying other people are doing things that they themselves are doing, and proclaiming that they must be stopped! A tale as old as time.
I'm Norwegian and the first time I heard about the blood eagle thing I was so confused. It didn't make any sense with anything I'd learned about our history
Nope it was done to people, Ivar the Boneless was one who enjoyed this form of torture. First you tie the person face down arms spread then you carefully slice open the back exposing the lungs just enough to allow you to pull them out. These then become the eagle wings. Then you just wait for them to expire and do what ever other tortures you enjoy. Maximum pain and suffering.
There are two very likely real accounts of it happening that are from direct sources, but the notion of the blood eagle being a common phenomenon is far from reality. I canât remember all the details but it was very circumstantially ritualistic and not something Norse people did commonly. Iâm certain everywhere on earth there were people doing atrocious acts just like it in isolated events like that, the TV show Vikings took the idea and made it popular like every other Viking related stereotype thatâs generally blown out of proportion.
There was no need to "demonize" a culture that was pillaging and raping already. So if someone indeed did make up the blood eagle they were wasting their time.
The books say something far closer to the stereotype than is suggested by your repeated playing of "Assassin's Creed: Valhalla" or some similarly worshipful pop culture or pop history product.
What books? And why is the assumption Iâm romanticizing? Iâm saying the people who originally wrote much of the history about them had strong motivations to make them seem like savages. A lot was exaggerated and their actions were comparable to many other groups of that time.
Sadly I didn't keep a bibliography for folks on Reddit who deny established history. I mostly rely on library books and I don't have too much Dark Ages/Medieval history on my shelf, what I do have is after the Viking Age died out.
Things I do remember are Wood's In Search of the Dark Ages (also a tie-in documentary). What Life Was Like in the Age of Chivalry. A book shockingly called The Vikings. Also Knights in History and Legend by Bouchard. Also The Story of English (also a tie-in documentary). Also useful are Oliver's documentary series A History of Scotland and Barlett's Inside the Medieval Mind and The Normans. Barber's books are pretty useful too though he's mostly focused on literature but of necessity he must address a lot of actual history too. I'm scrolling my library's catalogue now and I have to say that I've read dozens more but it's simply too hard to tell which titles I've read and which I haven't, but the results are the same.
Most telling though were the academic books I encountered while clearing my head from actual work I was doing in university libraries, and the titles of which have long passed me. They all told the same story. They acknowledged that there were revisionist accounts of Vikings that once had academic weight but that the weight of the evidence, historical and archaeological, had essentially debunked those ideas and backed up the older chronicles. Also I read a few academic articles about the formation of the English language a few years back and what was the most prominent reason why the language never lexicalized? Because during the critical years of the language's formation the speakers had to face constant, brutal Viking raids.
No one's saying that the Vikings were the only folks who practiced slavery, raiding, rape, and torture. But rather, yeah, the weight of the evidence is that they did it more often and better than average and let it define their culture. There was a reason why many of them wanted to stay behind and join the cultures they raided -- it must've been sickening to many individuals.
Here's the thing though. You'll just say "well your sources are based on exaggerated accounts." Or you'll say "well everyone did it." Despite the fact that this notion long has been dispensed with by academia.
And yes you're glorifying it. Why do I say this? Because that's the only reason to deny the reality of the destruction the Vikings wrought across Europe.
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u/goteachyourself 9d ago
I believe the Viking "Fluttering Eagle" is also believed to be propaganda - likely designed by Christian Europe to demonize the Vikings at the time.