This book explores Elene's perspective on the discovery of the True Cross as a narrative of political, spiritual and epistemic translatio and the multiple ways in which The Wanderer and The Ruin use images of ruins and the poetic formula "work of giants'" to construct an unknown and unrecoverable past; it also considers the engagements with 'untimely objects' in Beowulf and the Anonymous Old English Legend of the Seven Sleepers and how the Ruthwell Cross Poem and The Dream of the Rood play off "figural'" against 'literal' history.