The practice of relational reiteration shapes the Old English and Anglo-Latin riddles. Challenged to “say what I am” without actually naming themselves, the books, bells, wild creatures, and mysteries of the early English riddle tradition respond by reiterating their own conceptual edges, drawing upon the same types of social, chronological, and physical “landmarks” that a local tenant would use to perambulate property bounds. Aldhelm, the first known English riddle-writer, declares that his aim is to “reveal with verse the hidden mysteries of things,” and his Enigmata are explicitly framed as a cosmology: an attempt to articulate the subtle links between individual elements of God’s creation. Although the Old English Exeter riddles make no such claim, these poems are even more invested in the link between identity and practice: each speaker’s physical form comes into view through the lens of their interaction with human beings. The result in both cases is transformative. Each riddle creature is “built” incrementally, piece by piece, as the riddle describes its interactions with the hierarchical world outside itself—not physically, per se, but as a conceptual entity.