According to The Postgrad Chronicles, there's a lot of lore about Viking torture methods that walks the line between fact and fiction. It's unclear just how fictionalized some contemporary writings about the Vikings are, but the legends are a testament to how creative they seem to have been when it came time to torture those who crossed them.
First, there's the Blood Eagle. It's been described as the fate of several Vikings, but just how widely it was practiced — and indeed, if it ever was — is still up for debate. It involves carving the shape of an eagle into the victim's back, then cutting the ribs away from the spine and pulling out the lungs so they look like an eagle's wings.
There's also another sort of torture-turned-execution method described in Njals saga. After the Battle of Clontarf, Ulf Hraeda reportedly visited some ungodly amount of pain onto a fellow Viking named Brodir in retribution for killing Brian Boru. Ulf, it was said, sliced open a bit of Brodir, pulled out some intestine, then ordered him to walk around and around a tree, pulling out the rest of his innards as he walked. Fictional? Hopefully.
But a third torture method — which the victims survived — seems to be very real. It involved cutting holes through the victims' ankles behind their Achilles' tendons, then running ropes through the holes and stringing them upside-down. Death isn't looking so bad, is it?
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