Themed Set: Vikings
November 19th, 2011 Headsman
“From the fury of the Norsemen, oh Lord, deliver us!”
-Medieval prayer
Deep in the reptile brain of western Christendom lies the ancestral memory of Norse longships, heavy with bearskin-clad berserkers and Wagner extras, cleaving the icy North Seas en route to a remote commune whose altar relics want relieving.
These semimythical encounters are a difficult topic for this here blog because although they undoubtedly featured violence, and even executions, the Viking Age is also the European “Dark Ages” precisely because they didn’t keep a lot of reliable almanacs of bloggable execution dates.
This weekend, we fill that gap with two executions from the misty past of England: two near-fabulous near-executions linked to one another by family ties, and to posterity by national mythology.
On this day..
- 2010: Li Haito, reliquarian - 2019
- 1840: Zachariah Freeman - 2018
- Feast Day of St. Barlaam - 2017
- 1659: William Lamport, the real Zorro? - 2016
- 1784: Richard Barrick, Massachusetts highwayman - 2015
- 1895: Jesus Vialpando and Feliciano Chavez, desperados - 2014
- 1720: Edward Hunt, the first counterfeiter executed in colonial Pennsylvania - 2013
- 1929: Myles Fukunaga - 2012
- c. 865: Ragnar Lodbrok, Viking raider - 2011
- 1945: Three German war criminals - 2010
- 2002: Craig Neil Ogan, drug war informant - 2009
- 1928: Marshall Ratliff lynched for the Santa Claus Bank Robbery - 2008
- Themed Set: The "Ex" Stands for "Extrajudicial" - 2008
- 1915: Joe Hill - 2007
Entry Filed under: Themed Sets
