The Warhammer: 40,000 universe evokes imagery of human remains nearly everywhere one looks. Skulls alone can figuratively adorn ceramite armor as emblems, or literally find themselves impaled atop spikes as trophies, amassed as part of Khorne’s Skull Throne, or used as robotic skull-servos. Human remains are so ubiquitous that it inverts the question of “what role do the dead play in this setting?” and instead poses: what aren’t the dead used for in the 41st millenium? How does the grimdark setting of Warhammer: 40,000 shed light on what it means to live and die in a universe without informed consent on what happens with your body after death?
Drawing scholarly inspiration from cultural historians, ethicists, and anthropologists, I examine just what the “work of the dead” looks like in the 41st millenium, with two principal foci. First, I examine the role of human remains in display, both as trophies and as architectural features, and consider them in context of our contemporary ethics on trophy-taking museum displays, and ossuaries. Then, I turn to the ways in which human remains are recycled for more utilitarian means, from skull servitors and dreadnoughts to gene-seed harvesting and corpse-starch. I contrast these with a variety of contemporary ethical and legal practices (e.g., Abuse of Corpse Laws, the U.K.’s Human Tissues Act) in order to elucidate how the dead continue playing a role in the politics and realm of the living, both in our world and in the fictitious setting of Warhammer. In doing so, I argue that despite being a setting of grimdark fiction, Warhammer can shed light on our very real human problems today when it comes to what we should (or shouldn’t) do with our dead.
Author bio
Trent Trombley received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley with a focus on medieval bioarchaeology — the analysis of human skeletal remains from archaeological sites. He is currently an assistant professor of anthropology at Augustana University where he teaches courses on ethics and human remains.
