If Grendel’s arm becomes a broadcast mechanism for condign punishment, the severed head of the martyred ninth-century East Anglian king Edmund (d. 869) moves through multiple modes of media transmissions, first literally broadcasting its geo-location to the deceased king’s subjects before re-joining Edmund’s corpse to participate in a complicated Mattelartian series of physical
and divine communication circuits. In Abbo of Fleury’s and Ælfric of Eynsham’s respective mid tenth and early eleventh century accounts of the martyrdom of King (and then Saint) Edmund, Viking leaders of the invading Great Army capture, beat, and shoot the East Anglian king full of arrows before decapitating him and hiding the head in a forest.
1 Abbo of Fleury, Passio Sancti Eadmundi, Corolla Sancti Eadmundi: The Garland of Saint Edmund King and Martyr, ed. and trans. Francis Hervey (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1907), pp. 6–59 at pp. 32–41 [hereafter Abbo, Passio]; and Ælfric, Passio Sancti Eadmundi Regis et Martyris, Lives of Saints, ed. and trans. W.W. Skeat, EETS o.s. 94 and 114, 2 vols. (London: Oxford University Press 1966 [rprnt, o.s. 94 & 114]), 2: 314–33, ll.106–32 [hereafter Ælfric, Passio]. Page numbers for Abbo’s Passio and line numbers for Ælfric’s Passio are given in parentheses in the text. For recent critical treatments of this episode, see: Nicole Marafioti, The King’s Body: Burial and Succession in Late Anglo-Saxon England (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2014), pp. 184–88 and 206–13; Asa Simon Mittman, ‘Answering the Call of the Severed Head’, in Heads Will Roll: Decapitation Motifs in Medieval Literature, ed. Larissa Tracy and Jeff Massey (Leiden: Brill, 2012), pp. 311–27; and Mark Faulkner, ‘“Like a Virgin”: The Reheading of St. Edmund and Monastic Reform in Late-Tenth-Century England’, in Heads Will Roll, ed. Tracy and Massey, pp. 39–52. These versions both recount how Edmund’s followers then have to play a kind of ‘hot and cold’ game with the head to find it, with the head miraculously acting as a kind of geo-locative device – crying ‘Here! Here! Here!’ over and over again, like a homing beacon – until it is found, borne home, re-united with Edmund’s body, and buried, with a church subsequently built over the corpse.
2 Abbo, Passio, pp. 41–44; Ælfric, Passio, ll. 133–67. On the surface, the role that Edmund’s body plays in the legend appears simply and metonymically structured; the head continues its organic communication even after it receives its severance package. The divine miracle is that the dead and fragmented body functions as a living one should; in other words, the part remains as if whole. The symbolic significance of Edmund’s head is likewise readily available: the socio-political desire, divinely ratified, that the Christian East Anglians should not lose their head of state and be subjugated by non-Christian, Scandinavian invaders.
Abbo and Ælfric’s versions of the legend, however, locate Edmund’s miraculous body within a much broader context of communicational practices and desire that constructs the body as an essential and continuously shifting medium. Abbo and Ælfric’s versions both open with a carefully documented concern for how this somatic miracle has been preserved and transmitted over time. In Abbo’s Latin account, he is pressed by his brethren to assemble the story of Edmund, which he does as recollected from a telling by Archbishop Dunstan, who heard it in his youth from an old soldier, reportedly an eyewitness, who told it to the English king Athelstan. Ælfric repeats this line of transmission in his Old English adaptation, adding Abbo at its head.
3 Abbo, Passio, pp. 6–10; Ælfric, Passio, ll. 1–12. For Abbo, the preservation and transmission of the story aligns closely with the incorruptible preservation of Edmund’s holy body, a defense of which follows and punctuates Abbo’s description of historical transmission:
Quorum petitioni cum pro sui reverentia nollem contradicere, posthabitis aliquantulum sæcularium litterarum studiis, quasi ad interiorem philosophiam animae me contuli, dum eius qui vere philosophatus est in throno regni virtutes scribere proposui: maxime tamen eas, quæ post eius obitum, sæculis inauditæ, factæ sunt; quibus nemo crederet nisi eas tuæ assertionis irrefragabilis auctoritas roborasset. Siquidem tu, cui nix capitis credi compellit, quando referebas de ea quæ nunc est incorruptione regis, quidam diligentius inquisivit utrum hæc ita esse possent.
[So I undertook to describe these good deeds of the king, who committed himself on his kingdom’s throne to the philosophy of truth, and especially those deeds, matchless in the world’s history, which happened after his death – as none would believe them, if they were not vouched for by the irrefutable authority of your account. When you [Dunstan], whose snowy head compels belief, told of the continuing incorruption of the king’s body, one careful listener then desired to know how such things were possible]. (Abbo, Passio, 8)
In his dedicatory epistle to Dunstan, Abbo plays on the meaning of capitis as both ‘head’ and ‘chapter head’, making the archbishop’s own nix capitis ‘snowy head’ both the symbolic body part and textual source through which the miracle of Edmund’s head passes and is authenticated. The head, then, is already a remediated object – the locus of physical speech transformed into the textual record which is the ultimate form and destination of Edmund’s story.
In such texts, somatic fragmentation is what yields the unbroken message of dogmatic faith. As Abbo has Edmund himself proclaim when the Vikings capture him: quoniam etsi hoc corpus caducum fragile confringas velut vas fictile, vera libertas animi numquam tibi vel ad momentum suberit ‘even if you break this frail and mortal body into pieces like shards of pottery, my soul will never submit to you’ (Abbo, Passio, 30). When Edmund’s community forms a search party, they form a circulating communicational network to recover the missing head:
Cumque initio consilio omnes pari affectu ad id concurrerent, decreverunt ut cornibus vel tubis ductilibus singuli contenti essent, quatenus circumcirca pervagantes vocibus aut tubarum strepitu sibi mutuo innuerent, ne aut lustrata repeterent aut non lustrate desererent.
[A council was initiated, and all concurred on this point: it was decided that each individual should be equipped with a horn or pipe, so that the search party, in their roving around (circumcirca pervagantes) could signal one another by their voices or instruments]. (Abbo, Passio, 40)
Edmund refuses to stop calling out the name of Christ until the Vikings finally decapitate him (Abbo, Passio, 35), and his first post-mortem miracle is his head joining this network of signaling devices by continuing to broadcast its location. As Ælfric relates:
Hi eodon þa secende, and symle clypigende, swa swa hit gewunelic is þam ðe on wuda gað oft:
‘Hwær eart þu nu gefera?’
And him andwyrde þæt heafod:
‘Her, her, her.’
And swa gelome clypode andswarigende him eallum, swa oftswa heora ænig clypode, oþþæt hi ealle becomen þurh ða clypunga him to.
[They went on searching and calling out continually, as those who go through woods often do: / ‘Where are you now, friend?’ / And the head answered them: / ‘Here, here, here!’ / And so it called out repeatedly, answering them as often as any of them called to it, until they all came to it by means of those callings]. (Ælfric, Passio, 148–53)
In terms of media, this miracle signals in another way – the head becomes a hybrid of body and thing – speaking as living flesh would, yet also becoming comparable to the pipes and horns the king’s followers use. Abbo’s earlier version of the same episode focuses specifically on the somatic mechanism of the miracle in visceral detail:
Figure 1 Folio 17r from Morgan MS M. 736 (c. 1130). Reproduced with permission; photographic credit: The Morgan Library & Museum, New York.
Figure 2 Folio 17v from Morgan MS M. 736 (c. 1130). Reproduced with permission; photographic credit: The Morgan Library & Museum, New York.
Figure 3 Folio 18r from Morgan MS M. 736 (c. 1130). Reproduced with permission; photographic credit: The Morgan Library & Museum, New York.
Nec umquam eadem repetendo clamare destitit, quoad omnes ad se perduxit. Palpitabat mortuae linguae plectrum infra meatus faucium, manifestans in se Verbigenae magnalia, qui rudenti asellae compegit humana verba, ut increparet prophetae insipientiam.
[Nor would the head cease repeating its clamoring, until all were led to it. The chords of the dead tongue vibrated along the channel of the throat, manifesting the greatness of Him born from the Word, who endowed the braying ass with human speech, to shut down the foolish prophet]
. (Abbo,
Passio, 40)
4 Cf. Faulkner, ‘Like a Virgin’, p. 44.The reference to a talking ass is significant. It derives from the second epistle of Peter, which in turn references a biblical episode from the Book of Numbers where God shames the backsliding prophet Balaam by having the ass he is physically beating miraculously begin to talk back to him.
5 2 Peter, 2:12–16; Numbers, 22:27–34. Abbo’s inclusion of a talking ass reinforces the divinely artificed and vatic nature of Edmund’s ‘talking’.
6 Cf. Faulkner, ‘Like a Virgin’, pp. 44–45. Abbo’s own close descriptive focus at this moment on the pharyngeal-oral mechanism of vocal production has the effect of rendering the speech of Edmund’s decapitated head as something other than natural – like a cinematic close-up shot so close that it magnifies its subject beyond proportional familiarity. Though Edmund’s head still produces words, it is not accurate to regard those sounds as organic human speech. The words produced may be oral, but they are now also alien and artificial, akin to talking out of an ass. In this moment, the head becomes a media object; it calls out in English words, but the message is divine, not human, broadcast from somewhere else.
The desire of Edmund’s followers, and the hagiographic legend, to re-unite the head with the body provides the next stage of transformation of Edmund’s body from human communicant to hybrid somatic media, a continuation of Hayle’s posthuman formulation of the body as ‘a material-informational entity whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction’.
7 See n. 13, above. The head, once found, never speaks again, and subsequently becomes an object to be
translated (in the locative sense), circulating first through place and then later as spiritual currency. As Abbo and Ælfric both report, as soon as the head is refastened to the body, it is buried.
8 Abbo, Passio, p. 42; Ælfric, Passio, ll. 164–67. Edmund’s corporeal matter then serves as a foundation for church construction, where the body becomes materially venerated, and the function of Edmund’s physical matter becomes a part of more inhuman, architectural structures. A later, lavishly illuminated twelfth-century copy of Abbo’s account of Edmund’s martyrdom graphically depicts this architectural hybridisation of the king’s body in the three consecutive panels illustrating the reunion of Edmund’s body and head, the transportation of the corpse, and its entombment in the church of which Edmund serves as the foundation (Figs. 1–3).
9 Images also available in high resolution online: f.17r (https://www.themorgan.org/collection/Life-and-Miracles-of-St-Edmund/33), f.17v (https://www.themorgan.org/collection/Life-and-Miracles-of-St-Edmund/34) and f. 18r (https://www.themorgan.org/collection/Life-and-Miracles-of-St-Edmund/35). The design of the first two panels inflects organic material with architectural form in anticipation of an actual built ecclesiastical environment in the third. In the first of these panels, the tree branches over Edmund’s corpse unambiguously evoke the arcading of Anglo-Norman churches, while below the rectilinear dimensions of the cloth covering the king’s body takes on the form of an altar; the second panel visually reinforces Edmund
qua altar, or perhaps, now being carried,
qua portable reliquary; the third panel affirms these architectonic associations with representations of church arcading and Edmund’s own carved stone sarcophagus.
10 See also: Mittman, ‘Answering the Call’, pp. 317–20, who studies the Morgan cycle’s earlier illuminations of Edmund’s decapitation (ff. 13r and 14v) in terms of temporal disruption.In a Mattelartian mode, the narrative and graphic remediation of bodies like Edmund’s subsumes them into larger encoded routes of sacral meaning, where they operate as a fixed relay or junction point between the earthly and the divine; Edmund’s head and body become a cultic destination, where relics and tombs function as material nodes for another kind of circulation – networks of spiritual and economic allegiances between ecclesiastical sites and individual worshippers.
11 For a study of relics and tombs functioning in such spiritual and economic networks, see: Karen Overbey, Sacral Geographies: Relics and Reliquaries in Medieval Ireland (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011). For a study of the growth of Bury St Edmunds and the economic impact of Edmund’s cult, see: Sarah Foot, ‘Households of St Edmund’, Studies in Church History 50 (2014): 47–58; Bernard Gauthiez, ‘The Planning of the Town of Bury St Edmunds: a Probable Norman Origin’, in Bury St Edmunds: Medieval Art and Architecture, Archaeology and Economy, ed. Antonia Gransden (Leeds: British Archaeological Association, 1998), pp. 81–97; and Margaret Statham, ‘The Medieval Town of Bury St Edmunds’, in Bury St Edmunds: Medieval Art and Architecture, Archaeology and Economy, ed. Antonia Gransden (Leeds: British Archaeological Association, 1998), pp. 98–110. The precise location of Edmund’s martrydom and early edification is uncertain, but his body did get around; his remains may have first been interred at ‘Hæglesdun’ (present-day Hoxne), but by c. 1000 they were at the center of a thriving cult at Beadoriceworth, which then developed into Bury St Edmunds and the site of perhaps the most popular and profitable cultic destination in early medieval England.
12 Antonia Gransden, ‘Legends and Traditions Concerning the Origin of the Abbey at Bury St. Edmunds’, in Legends, Traditions and History in Medieval England (London: Bloomsbury, 1992), pp. 81–106 at pp. 87–88 and passim.As Abbo and Ælfric both relate, when Edmund’s body is exhumed some years later, to be moved again to a new church, his body is found uncorrupted, the head now miraculously one with the body. Abbo writes, ‘ita sanum et incolume repartum est, ut non dicam redintegratum et compactum corpori, sed omnino in eo nichil vulneris, nichil cicatrices apparuerit’ [I cannot say the head was renewed and joined to the body, because in all there was no wound or scar apparent] (Abbo,
Passio, 44). Ælfric expands Abbo’s statement to include a complete healing of all of the many arrow wounds Edmund suffered (Ælfric,
Passio, 181–84). Immediately after his statement, though, Abbo backtracks a bit; even though there is no discernable scar, there is one noticeable thing: a sign of martyrdom (
signum martyrii) – the thinnest red crease around the corpse’s neck, like a dyed scarlet thread: ‘rubet una tenuissima ruga in modum fili coccinei’ (Abbo,
Passio, 44–46). As Mark Faulkner has noted, the incorrupted state of a martyr’s body is highly unusual,
13 Faulkner, ‘Like a Virgin’, p. 46. and so while Edmund’s body may be miraculously and completely healed, it cannot remain
un(re)marked.
In his Old English account, Ælfric uses the communicationally charged verb
sweotelunge to describe the neckline as: ‘his swura wæs gehalod þe ær wæs forslagen / and wæs swylce an seolcen þræd embe his swuran ræd / mannum to sweotelunge hu he ofslagen wæs’ [and his neck was healed which was before cut-through, / and it was as if a silk thread around his neck, read (red) / as a testament to men how he was slain] (Ælfric,
Passio, 178–80).
Sweotelunge derives from the Old English word
sweotol ‘clear’ a word already noted above as operative in the language describing the mass media-like function of Grendel’s arm. The root meaning of
sweotelunge describes an act which is visibly manifest, but the term in common use denotes some kind of communication or record;
sweotelunge is that which defines, explains, testifies, or reveals. Charters and wills are examples of, and defined as,
sweotelunge.14 J. Bosworth and T. N. Toller, An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, based on the Manuscript Collections of the Late Joseph Bosworth; Edited and Enlarged by T. Northcote Toller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908), s.v. sweotolung, definition IV. The red line, then, marks the body with a particularly complex encoding of a record of absent information, the acts of violence that God has erased but must still be readable; in effect, Edmund’s body must archive God’s miracle. Ælfric’s comment that this mark was ‘ræd mannum to sweotelunge hu he ofslagen wæs’ [was read (red) by men as a clear token of how he was slain] (179–80) makes clear itself how the body now functions as inscribed object, while also perhaps punning on the ‘red’ visual nature of the mark.
15 The standard spelling of the Old English word for ‘red’ is read, but is also on occasion spelled ræde (e.g. ræde clæfer (‘red clover’), cited in Bosworth-Toller, Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, entry for read, definition a. See also the Middle English Dictionary (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1952–2001), entry for red (noun 2, ‘red’), which lists ræd as an early form.On Edmund’s body, the negative evidence of invisible healing must be made manifest, and the body is reinscribed
with physical evidence of Edmund’s fragmentation and re-union, hence the order in Abbo’s account first of complete healing and
then the re-marking of the body in red.
16 This physical ambiguity recalls Asa Mittman’s contention, that in Ælfric’s account, Edmund is actually decapitated twice (‘Answering the Call’, p. 317). In John Lydgate’s Lives of St. Edmund and Fremund, a fifteenth-century retelling of this legend for King Henry VI, Lydgate changes this somatic moment from a red mark to a purple one (‘a space appered, breede of a purpil threed’), translating the acts of violence upon the body as a symbolic reference to royalty. See: John Lydgate, Lives of St. Edmund and Fremund, ed. Anthony Bale and A. S. G. Edwards (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2009), l. 1993. In Abbo’s closing section of his version of the legend, when he describes the subsequent miracles related to the viewing of Edmund’s corpse, he explains these miracles continue to occur over time because ‘quod licet ejus anima sit in cœlesti Gloria, non tamen per visitationem die noctuque longe est a corporis præsentia’ [though [a saint’s] spirit may be in heavenly glory, nevertheless it may visit the body, and is not day and night long from the body in present time] (Abbo,
Passio, 54). In its incorruptibility and its miracles, then, Abbo understands the saint’s body as a vatic vessel, not as only symbolic of God’s power, but as an active conduit for divine communication, which the heavenly spirit may re-enter, recharge, and re-use as the
manifestation, the mechanism of holy expression in a complex Mattelartian circuit of physical and divine communication, circulation, and material networks. Centuries after Edmund’s death and enshrinement, his body parts (or proxies for them) continue to circulate; when Edmund’s cultic shrine at Bury was threatened by a new wave of Scandinavian invaders in 1009, his relics travel to London, where they remained at St Paul’s until journeying back to Bury in 1012.
17 Marafioti, King’s Body, p. 93. The inexorability of Edmund’s body becoming something other than human – its translation (in both senses) from speaking person to speaking object, to cultic architectural node, to circulating relic, to divine medium – reveals and revels in the early medieval body’s capacity for multiple communicative functions within media ecologies, and how those ecologies can redefine the body’s form and function in the process.