The Blood-Ground of Þorgils — Where the Grass Will Not Cover the Stain

East Iceland Highlands

The blood-eagle was performed three times in Iceland according to the sagas. The site of the most notorious execution, at the farm of Þorgils in East Iceland, is said to bear a patch of ground where grass has never successfully grown — the stain of the rite soaking too deep to be covered.

The blood-eagle — blóðörn — was the most extreme execution rite in the Norse tradition, documented in several sagas and debated by historians as to whether it was ever literally performed or was primarily a literary formulation of total vengeance. Iceland's saga tradition, with its characteristic preference for the concrete over the symbolic, treats it as real and records three specific instances with named individuals, witnesses, and locations. The blóðörn required the condemned to be restrained face-down. The ribs were separated from the spine with a knife and pulled outward to form wings. The lungs were drawn out through the opening and spread over the exposed ribs. The condemned could theoretically survive this process long enough to be considered to have died without crying out — which the tradition required for the full honour of the act to be conferred. One of the three Icelandic instances is attached to a farm in the East Iceland highlands, at a property associated with a chieftain named Þorgils in the saga record. The execution was performed in the autumn — the timing mattered for the disposal of the body, which had to be complete before winter. The farm itself no longer exists as a functioning settlement. The highland location has reverted to rough grazing. But the tradition from the surrounding district is consistent: there is a patch of ground at the approximate location of the old farmyard, roughly four metres across, where grass and heather grow less successfully than in the immediately adjacent area. The soil samples taken from it in the 20th century showed no chemical explanation. The saga tradition does not explain why some acts leave marks on the ground. It simply notes that some do.