Debunking the "blood eagle"

Over a period of several years I incorporated into some of my lectures a discussion of the "blood eagle" maneuver supposedly devised by the Vikings.  Now a Smithsonian article says that this (in)famous ritual is probably apocryphal:

One does not have to search too far in the secondary sources to uncover explicit descriptions of what execution by the blood eagle entailed. At its most elaborate... the ritual involved several distinct stages. First the intended victim would be restrained, face down; next, the shape of an eagle with outstretched wings would be cut into his back. After that...(continued below the fold)...
...his ribs would be hacked from his spine with an ax, one by one, and the bones and skin on both sides pulled outward to create a pair of “wings” from the man’s back. The victim, it is said, would still be alive at this point to experience the agony of what Turner terms “saline stimulant”—having salt rubbed, quite literally, into his vast wound. After that, his exposed lungs would be pulled out of his body and spread over his “wings,” offering witnesses the sight of a final bird-like “fluttering” as he died...

That there are some problems with these claims will not surprise anyone who has studied this period of history; sources for the ninth- and 10th-century Scandinavian world are few, mostly late and open to interpretation...

Frank goes on to a learned discussion of the Norse love of gnomic poetry and of how these lines may best be translated—much depends, apparently, on the instrumental force of the ablative. Her view, though, is clearly stated: “An experienced reader of skaldic poetry, looking at [the] stanza in isolation from its saga context, would have trouble seeing it as anything but a conventional utterance, an allusion to the eagle as a carrion beast, the pale bird with red claws perched on and slashing the back of the slain: ‘Ívarr had Ella’s back scored by an eagle.’ ” And the image of an eagle’s claws, she concludes, is conventionally paired with the suffering of martyrs in texts written by Christian scribes throughout late antiquity and the early medieval period...