The Old English exile elegies attempt to recuperate loss by reiterating an inverted set of social and physical landmarks, mapping the past onto the present. The familiar imagery of the hall, the lord, and the voices of other human beings – the relationships that constitute community – are not absent in exile: instead, in the absence of the “real thing,” each exile must reconstruct and reiterate a set of replacement landmarks to understand their current situation. Similarly, The Ruin navigates the loss of living memory by imagining the past context necessary to fit its subject back into the fabric of a living world. The frequent depiction of the exile elegies as nostalgic, repetitive, or static is not an incidental formal element, but a core response to the loss of relational landmarks. In exile, alienation from the past—the spoliation of memory as well as the loss of community—suspends the relational self in time. Yet the Old English exiles continue to navigate inverted relational landmarks of identity. The solution is not to abandon relational reiteration; it is instead to seek a new point of departure when familiar points of reference are lost.