THE OLD ENGLISH (OE) version of Alexander's Letter to Aristoteles (henceforth abbreviated as AlexArist) is a translation of the Latin Epistola Alexandri ad Aristotelem. When this was originally composed is difficult to tell. In any case, the Latin text and its OE rendering show an interest in Alexander the Great even in the early Middle Ages. AlexArist is largely fictitious; it narrates Alexander's exploits in India and introduces a wealth of strange creatures, many of which attack Alexander and his army.

The OE AlexArist is one of the prose texts preserved in the famous Beowulf manuscript, which was written around the year 1000; now it is manuscript London, British Library, Cotton Vitellius A. xv, where AlexArist occurs on fols. 107r–131v. As Kenneith Sisam has plausibly suggested, the Beowulf manuscript was probably assembled as a book of monsters, and AlexArist certainly fits into this category.

The OE AlexArist was edited three times in the twentieth century, namely by Rypins in 1924 for the Early English Text Society (Latin text and OE version), by Fulk in 2010, 34–83 (OE version and Modern English (ModE) translation), and by Orchard in 1995 (OE version with a ModE translation, and Latin text). Here I quote from the revised edition by Orchard because it is more recent than Rypins, and because it presents the Latin and the OE texts. I have expanded 7 to and; the paragraphs (§) refer to Orchard's edition. The translations offered here are often indebted to or dependent on Orchard's translations.

Like the other texts of the Beowulf manuscript, most notably Beowulf itself, AlexArist is probably a copy of a text that was composed (or rather translated) much earlier. It is often assumed that the original translation of AlexArist was in the Anglian (more specifically Mercian) dialect of OE (see also section on Dialect Vocabulary on pp. 111–12 below), and that the original translation was made in the second half of the ninth century, which would roughly coincide with the reign of King Alfred (king of Wessex 871– 899). Because there are no OE prose texts that can definitely be dated earlier than the reign of Alfred, the OE AlexArist may belong to the earliest layer of OE prose.