How does a body become such a form of media? A stick is not media
per se, but once some letters are carved on it, the object has been modified by design, enabling communication to happen over a greater distance or time than native physical expression – speech or gestures – allow. And once altered for informational effect, a media object can then circulate and communicate over time, space, or both. Marked, modified, or materially hybridised bodies have a similar media capacity. In the posthuman turn, the boundaries between media, matter, and bodies have become porous and ontologically and epistemologically messy, moving past the phenomenological inheritance of modernity and its default marked divide between what is body and what is media. Modern media have historically and broadly been conceived of as appropriating and extending the human body’s capacities for expression, sensation, and perception to produce modes of communication.
1 Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Methuen, 1982), pp. 81–82. Bodies help the individual use media – our physical bodies interface with non-somatic devices, for example when we use objects such as a pen, a computer, a radio, or a phone, to communicate or access information. In this traditional perception, the body plays only a secondary role: the operator, the receiver, the user. But this ontology of media remains deeply rooted in the body. While a basic understanding of media centers the communicational object that literally goes in the middle (
media) of human bodies sending and receiving, these bodies also have the capacity to move to the middle of the communicational model and can be marked or modified to circulate with meaning beyond its essential corporeality. In this way, the body can become a form of mobile media itself, another, more literal version of a particularly favored phrase in media studies these days: embodied media.
2 Jason Farman, ‘Stories, Spaces, and Bodies: the Production of Embodied Space through Mobile Media Storytelling’, Communication Research and Practice 1.2 (2015): 101–16; Keram Malicki–Sanchez, ‘Out of Our Minds: Ontology and Embodied Media in a Post-Human Paradigm’, in Handbook of Research on the Global Impacts and Roles of Immersive Media, ed. Jacquelyn Ford Morie and Kate McCallum (Hershey: IGI Global, 2019), pp. 10–36; Lidija Fištrek, ‘The Body as Media in Digital Art’, In Medias Res 7.13 (2018): 2029–38.Mutilated, marked, and fragmented bodies of all kinds – living, dead, and even undead – punctuate the media landscape of early medieval England, and these bodily forms constitute a continuum of medieval somatic media. When medieval bodies are physically altered, whether through violence or other technologically derived means, they can also become inflected bodies, the carriers of new information. Such bodies are not that far from N. Kate Hayles’ formulation of the body as part of ‘a material-informational entity whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction’.
3 Hayles, Posthuman, p. 3. More than sites of textualisation, early medieval bodies are bio-political (or, given the nature of early medieval ‘politics’, bio-theological) sites of technological inflection and modification, contributing to distributive ecologies of technology, flesh, and information within early medieval literary, legal, and spiritual practices.
Understanding medieval bodies as medieval media can evolve our understanding of the function and meaning of bodies in even the most canonical of Old English literature
. Even in
Beowulf scholarship of relatively recent vintage, interpretation of the poem’s fragmented bodies remains largely metonymic in function, where the fragmentation of bodies carries both literary and social meaning for the collapse of a whole.
4 For example, Gillian R. Overing who writes that arms (body parts and weapons) ‘still encapsulate the man, demarcate the parameters of the male body, suggest or dictate claims to interiority; arms are the man, can substitute for him’. ‘Beowulf on Gender’, New Medieval Literatures 12 (2010): 1–22 at p. 5. Beyond these narrow literary approaches, the fragmentation of the body has an ideated capacity for transmission, for information that is extra-somatic, extra-human, and, for the purposes of literary analysis, extra-narrative. Bodies in
Beowulf may also stand as models for how new information encoded on somatic matter moves beyond the originating creature or kind, and up and out from internal literary dynamics to a surrounding constellation of cultural transmission and reception.
In a well-known detail from the poem, after Beowulf kills Grendel, Hrothgar mounts the monster’s arm under the roof of Heorot in commemoration of the victory. As a result, the detached body part is unambiguously refashioned as a device designed to communicate:
þæt wæs tacen sweotol
syþðan hildedeor hond alegde
earm ond eaxle – þær wæs eal geador
Grendles grape – under geapne hrof. (833b–836b)
[That was a clear sign, / after the battle-bold one raised up the hand, / arm and shoulder – there it was all together / the grip of Grendel – under the gaping roof].
5 Beowulf, ed. Frederick Klaeber, 4th ed., ed. R. D. Fulk, Robert E. Bjork, and John D. Niles (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2008). Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.The poem notes that the arm’s joining to the hall roof makes it a
tacen sweotol – a ‘clear sign’ to all who see it. This act is not simply a symbolic moment; Leslie Lockett points out that in the sparse descriptive context of this episode, this
tacen is not actually
sweotol at all, and might signify different meanings across a variety of informational indices ranging from the purely symbolic (the might of Beowulf) to the socially thematic (constructing a warning of the violence that must continue within the Danish community), to the legally specific (a receipt, as it were, for condign punishment and payment in lieu of a
wergild, or as a public display of the body as prerequisite evidence of a legal homicide).
6 Leslie Lockett, ‘The Role of Grendel’s Arm in Feud, Law, and the Narrative Strategy of Beowulf’, in Latin Learning and English Lore, ed. Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe and Andy Orchard (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2005), pp. 368–88; see also: Rolf Bremmer, ‘Grendel’s Arm and the Law’, in Studies in English Language and Literature: Doubt Wisely: Papers in Honour of E. G. Stanley, ed. M. J. Toswell and E. M. Tyler (New York: Routledge,1996), pp. 121–32 at pp. 126–7; Gale R. Owen–Crocker, ‘Horror in Beowulf: Mutilation, Decapitation, and Unburied Dead’, in Early Medieval English Texts and Interpretations: Studies Presented to Donald G. Scragg, ed. Elaine Treharne and Susan Rosser (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2003), pp. 81–100 at p. 94 n. 23. For the Danes in Heorot hall, and for early medieval subjects hearing or reading
Beowulf, Grendel’s limb, physically remounted to be visible to all, obtains the capacity to
broadcast, communicating a spectrum of information as it does so. In media theory terms, Grendel’s mounted arm functions as a classic example of the cultural model of information transmission and reception.
7 For treatments of the cultural model of communication, see: James Carey, ‘A Cultural Approach to Communication’, in Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (New York: Routledge, 2009), pp. 11–28 and Stuart Hall, ‘Encoding/Decoding’, in Media and Cultural Studies, ed. Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas M. Kellner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 137–144. See also: Bremmer, ‘Grendel’s Arm’, p. 128 and Daniel O’Gorman, ‘Mutilation and Spectacle in Anglo–Saxon Legislation’, in Capital and Corporal Punishment in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Jay Paul Gates and Nicole Marafioti (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2014), pp. 149–64 at p. 154. For analogous discussions of the display of heads or headless corpses for similar purposes and effect in early medieval English landscape, as documented in Old English boundary clauses in charters and elsewhere, see: Victoria Whitworth, Dying and Death in Later Anglo-Saxon England (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2004), pp. 188–90; Helen Appleton, ‘The Role of Æschere’s Head’, Review of English Studies 68 (2017): 428–47; and Thijs Porck and Sander Stolk, ‘Marking Boundaries in Beowulf: Æschere’s Head, Grendel’s Arm and the Dragon’s Corpse’, Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik 77.3–4 (2017): 521–40. The signal through a medium might be clear from sender to receiver, but its reception cannot ever be fixed or assured. Grendel’s arm on the roof becomes a thickly associative media moment – not of communication
per se, but rather something richer – a carefully embedded valuation of communication, marked by clear signs and their unknown meanings, broadcasting to and from early medieval English audiences of
Beowulf both an unambiguous desire for information to be sent and received, the importance of such systems at times of social crisis, and perhaps, an ironic jamming of the system. What
is clear at this moment in the poem is that the body part plays a signal, transmissive role within it.
The ambiguity of what and how Grendel’s arm communicates also indicates the critical difficulty of defining the body as medieval media. Because of their complicated ontological relationship to communication as both potential source and conduit, bodies do not fit neatly into classic and modern categories of media. Rather, bodies’ potential to store and transmit information overlap and move across categories and functions of media. Like information, bodies and their parts circulate through social networks. Mutilated, marked, or changed bodies, like any bodies, can continue to move through the space of community, but their altered states charge that space with new meaning.
While
Beowulf may construct Grendel as a ‘monster’ that needs to be killed for revenge, and as a potent symbol of humanity’s own monstrosity, the text also regards him as a force that has literally decentered the Danish community, who enacts violent slaughter and yet, as the poem notes, refuses to pay the compensatory
wergild for his crimes (156–58). For early medieval English audiences, Beowulf’s violent severing and Hrothgar’s ceremonious displaying of Grendel’s arm celebrates Grendel’s punishment inside a contemporary social and juridical context, moving it from what Valerie Allen has termed the realm of the simply compensatory to that of the disciplinary.
8 Valerie Allen, ‘When Compensation Costs an Arm and a Leg’, in Capital and Corporal Punishment, ed. Gates and Marafioti, pp. 17–33. See also: Daniela Fruscione, ‘Beginnings and Legitimation of Punishment in Early Anglo-Saxon Legislation from the Seventh to the Ninth Century’, in Capital and Corporal Punishment, pp. 35–37. Now more than a symbolically lifeless limb, Grendel’s arm (followed later by his head), becomes a communicational device, technologically inflected by the mechanism of its mounting under Heorot’s
geapne hrof ‘gaping roof’ (836b), hybridised by a formal assimilation into this architectural structure, and encoding, compressing, and transmitting for medieval subjects both inside and outside the poem the disciplining message of what happens to criminally transgressive figures such as Grendel.