The Poetics of Value: Hermes, the Tortoise, and the Transformative Power of the Marginal

This paper examines how seemingly marginal objects, bodies, and forms acquire cultural value through processes of transformation and recontextualisation. Its point of departure is the Homeric “Hymn to Hermes,” in which the infant god encounters a tortoise and transforms its shell into the resonating body of the lyre. Rather than treating the tortoise merely as the material precursor of a musical instrument, the paper asks how Hermes' encounter with a seemingly insignificant creature generates new aesthetic, social, and symbolic possibilities. The transformation is understood not simply as a change of function, but as a creative reconfiguration of relations: Hermes produces a new cultural value, enables an exchange with Apollo, and contributes to the formation of his own identity as an inventor, mediator, and cultural intermediary. The paper then places this episode in dialogue with the myth of Chelone, in which a nymph's transformation into a tortoise turns the shell into a material sign of enforced seclusion and social stigma, and with Jackie Kay's short story “Shell,” in which a woman's gradual transformation into a tortoise reverses the conventional logic of metamorphosis. In Kay's story, the shell initially signifies bodily alienation and the loss of a socially recognisable human identity; progressively, however, it becomes a medium through which an alternative and more authentic sense of self can emerge. Read together, these texts invite a reconsideration of transformation as a process of value production rather than merely a change of form or identity. The paper argues that shells, bodies, animal forms, and instruments are not passive or secondary elements, but active participants in the production of cultural meaning. Their significance does not reside exclusively in inherent properties; it emerges relationally through contact, reframing, exchange, and transformation. Myth and its literary afterlives thus offer a privileged space for examining how value is generated from what initially appears peripheral, and how transforming another body or object may simultaneously transform the identity and position of the transformer.