The action of Shiz arising and struggling for breath, without his head, is a difficult scene to imagine. Nevertheless, a modern medical doctor examined the passage and noted that if the sword was not precisely at the neck, but at the base of the skull, then it was actually the severing of the midbrain. With Coriantumr’s documented exhaustion, there is no reason to expect that he made a clean decapitation. Cutting through the midbrain would result in the rising, though clearly the idea that he “struggled for breath” was not a medical description, but a literary one.