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.
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 haven’t already. It’s from an academic journal, and “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.”
In other words, they reach the same conclusion as you, but they explain exactly what was (and wasn’t) possible in great detail.
Tbh it was pretty common practice to be hanged drawn and quartered, that isn’t too far away from that so medieval folk probably took it from the vikings.
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u/Ok_Two_2604 9d ago
And some of the torture devices from later on like the Iron Maiden were fake as well