Rebuilding the Fabulated Bodies of the Hoard Warriors

When Anglo-Saxon warriors buckled on gem encrusted, intricately wrought gold arms and armor, they did not merely transform their appearance, but shifted their fundamental ontology. We consider objects from the Staffordshire Hoard as embodiments of fah and ælf-sciéne, specifically Anglo-Saxon ideas of visual splendor, and the modern notion of bling in order to excavate their role in the transformation of men into posthuman teratological wonders. We strive to imagine the hoard not as a series of objects but as embodied apparatuses inextricable from those who wore them and from the violence they were intended to fend off, yet accelerate