"The Letter of Alexander to Aristotle"

The sole copy of the Old English prose translation of The Letter of Alexander to Aristotle survives in the Nowell Codex (c. 1000), where it is now preceded by two other vernacular prose texts (The Passion of Saint Christopher and The Wonders of the East) and followed by two poetic ones (Beowulf and Judith).

The anonymous letter derives from the Latin Epistola Alexandri ad Aristotelem, believed to have been first translated from Greek in the early fourth century CE. The Old English translation was probably a product of the Mercian prose tradition that flourished in the second half of the ninth century. Like most Mercian prose, this translation cleaves closely to its Latin source. Nevertheless, the translator omits a handful of details throughout and curtails Alexander’s enumeration of his adventures embarked on after learning of his impending death. The text extends a late antique efflorescence of Alexander lore, with the conqueror’s contests playing out in myriad medieval works east and west.

The Old English version of the Letter rehearses several such adventures. Addressing his mother Olimphias, his sisters, and his instructor Aristotle, Alexander writes home with the express purposes of informing them of his accomplishments, his struggles, and his eyewitness accounts of India and Persia. While the letter ends on a somber note, the conqueror insists to his teacher that he composes this letter þæt þu ærest gefeo in þæm fromscipe mines lifes ond eac blissige in þæm weorð-myndum (‘chiefly that you may rejoice in my life’s work and also gladden in the glories’).

On its surface, Alexander’s narrative traces his pursuit and defeat of King Porus of India. Along the way, the conqueror details the region’s riches and natural wonders, both of which come into his possession. Not long into the letter, however, readers discern subtler narrative strands that inform Alexander’s mission, including his desire to explore greater India and the severe cost of doing so. Whether to confront Porus or to experience the region’s marvels firsthand, Alexander pursues perilous routes that continuously endanger him and his perishing forces. Indeed, readers may construe his army’s invasion of the unknown territory as a protracted battle against the elements, a battle they never win.

Alexander presents his readers with a more or less linear sequence of events, beginning with his men’s march through Bactria and into the borders of Persia, whose inhabitants they fight for nearly three weeks. Discovering that King Porus is seeking information about the strength of his adversary and his army, Alexander disguises himself as a commoner seeking food and wine. On entering Porus' camp, he is brought before the Indian king and questioned about the intentions of the Greek leader, his nature and his age. Alexander deceives Porus, telling him that the Greek is extremely old, so old þæt he ne mihte elcor gewearmigan buton æt fyre ond æt gledum (‘that he cannot keep warm without being near fire and coals’). Porus rejoices at this news, and asks Alexander to take back a message to his king. Alexander explains to his mother, Olimphias, that he is relating all of this to her in order to demonstrate the oferhygdlican gedyrstignesse (‘haughty presumption’) of the Indian king. Yet for the reader of the Letter, this episode also hints at Alexander’s illusory vigor and the untimely death he soon must face.

After Porus’s surrender, Alexander intensifies his quest to experience the region’s native exotica. The army has hitherto weathered deadly snakes, sea monsters, apex predators, various vermin, and extreme thirst, yet now Alexander introduces the letter’s most wondrous creatures, including a herd of monstrous women: hairy as beasts, tall as giants; cynocephali: dog-headed, human-bodied creatures; and a wave of natural disasters: fierce winds, heavy snows, consuming fires.

Alexander presses on undeterred, seeking ever more wondrous sites until he is directed toward the narrow way to the sacred grove, home to the prophetic trees of the sun and moon. Selecting a few thousand men, Alexander pursues this course, and with three hundred, he enters the grove where he first wishes to conquer the world: ðohte ic on minum mode hwæþer ic meahte ealne middan-geard me on onweald geslean (‘I thought in my heart whether I could force the earth under my power’). Alexander also wishes to return to his family, a dream he will not realize. According to the sun tree, he will indeed rule the world, but all too briefly, dying unexpectedly in Babylon the following May.

The Old English letter ends on these fateful notes, with Alexander less dismayed by his death sentence than by his stunted potential:

Ond me næs se hrædlica ende mines lifes swa miclum weorce swa me wæs þæt ic læs mærðo gefremed hæfde þonne min willa wære.

[And the sudden end of my life was not as great a grief to me as (the fact) that I had attained less praise than was my will.]

Despite the keen awareness of his mortality, Alexander appears oblivious to the transience of earthly existence itself, and instead closes his epistle with the consolation that his life’s achievements will last the ages.

Scholars continue to debate this letter’s textual and reception histories, discussing, for instance, the dating and possible occasions for its translation into Old English. Thematically, the Nowell Codex’s texts attend to the spiritual dimensions of their wondrous worlds set beyond eleventh-century England, worlds inhabited by monstrous creatures whose racialization by ethnic and cultural means facilitates their subjugation or erasure. To differing extents, the works in the Nowell Codex value virtues such as self-mastery and effective leadership. Within this frame, the Letter provides audiences with an opportunity to question Alexander’s competence as a commander, weighing up the great losses he and his army incur, his acknowledgement of and empathy and response toward those losses, and the counsel and trust of his men.

Other prominent issues the letter raises include the question of Alexander’s cupidity and the problem of his fate. The sun tree states openly that it intends not to divulge the details of Alexander’s death in order that its prediction come to pass:

Gif ic þe þone syrere gesecge þines feores, yþelice þu ða wyrde oncyrrest ond his hond befehst.

[If I tell you the taker of your life, you will easily evade the event and seize his hand.]

Still, the tree does inform Alexander that he will die by poison in Babylon, leaving readers to speculate why he would later enter the city at all should he hope to alter his fate. His acceptance of the prophecy may illustrate popular attitudes toward divine decree.

As a function of the epistolary genre, the letter offers readers occasion to study its sender’s interiority, his perceived failure to live up to his potential, or his wish to return home to his family despite suspecting he never will. As recipients of his letter, readers past and present may judge their own personal and social circumstances against Alexander’s, whether by inserting themselves in his narrative person to join him on his adventures, or by reflecting on their own standing—social, moral, spiritual, etc.—in response to his report.

Select bibliography

Digitised manuscripts

London, British Library, Cotton MS Vitellius A XV:

https://www.bl.uk/research/digitised-manuscripts/ [currently unavailable]

Facsimiles

Malone, Kemp, ed. The Nowell Codex: British Museum Cotton Vitellius A. XV, second ms., (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1963).

Editions

Fulk, R. D., ed. and trans. ‘The Letter of Alexander the Great to Aristotle’, in The Beowulf Manuscript, Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 3, ed. and trans. R.D. Fulk (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), pp. 33–83.

Orchard, Andy, ed. and trans. ‘Appendix IIc: The Letter of Alexander to Aristotle: A translation of the Old English text’, in Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the Beowulf Manuscript, ed. Andy Orchard (Cambridge, 1985; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), pp. 225–53.

Rypins, Stanley, ed. Three Old English Prose Texts in MS. Cotton Vitellius A xv, Early English Text Society 161 (London, 1924; Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 1998).

Criticism

Abdelkarim, Sherif. ‘The Way of the Superbious Man: Alexander to Aristotle and the Riddle of the Letter’, English Studies 105 (2024), 750–71.

Bunt, Gerrit H. V. Alexander the Great in the literature of Medieval Britain, Mediaevalia Groningana 14 (Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 1994).

Hooper, Teresa M. Re-Mapping the Space of the Sacred in the Nowell Codex. 2016. University of Tennessee, Knoxville, PhD dissertation. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/3863/.

Khalaf, Omar. ‘The Old English Alexander’s Letter to Aristotle: Monsters and Hybris in the Service of Exemplarity’, English Studies 94 (2013), 659–67.

Kim, Susan M. ‘“If One Who Is Loved Is Not Present, A Letter May be Embraced Instead”: Death and the Letter of Alexander to Aristotle’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 109 (2010), 33–51.

McFadden, Brian. ‘The Social Context of Narrative Disruption in The Letter of Alexander to Aristotle’, Anglo-Saxon England 30 (2001), 91–114.

Orchard, Andy. Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the Beowulf Manuscript (Cambridge, UK, 1985; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995).

Perillo, Kate. ‘The Limits of Ongietenisse: Translating Global Imagination in the Old English Letter of Alexander to Aristotle’, Parergon 35 (2018), 67–89.

Powell, Kathryn. ‘Laying Down the Law: First-person Narration and Moral Judgement in the Old English Letter of Alexander to Aristotle’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 86 (2004), 55–68.

——. ‘Meditating on Men and Monsters: A Reconsideration of the Thematic Unity of the Beowulf Manuscript’, The Review of English Studies 57 (2006), 1–15.

Sauer, Hans. ‘The Old English Version of Alexander’s Letter to Aristoteles and its Use of Binomials’, in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History, series 3, volume 18: Essays in Memory of Paul E. Szarmach, part 2, ed. Joel T. Rosenthal and Virginia Blanton (Leeds: Arc, 2024), pp. 95–129.

Thomson, Simon C. Communal Creativity in the Making of the ‘Beowulf’ Manuscript: Towards a History of Reception for the Nowell Codex (Leiden: Brill, 2018).

——. ‘Otherwheres in the Prose Texts of the Nowell Codex: Here and Otherwhere’, in Ideas of the World in Early Medieval English Literature, ed. Mark Atherton, Kazutomo Karasawa and Francis Leneghan (Turnhout: Brepols, 2022), pp. 103–126.

Sherif Abdelkarim is Assistant Professor of English at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.