Which prose work immediately precedes Beowulf in the Nowell Codex?

The prose work immediately preceding Beowulf in the Nowell Codex is the Letter of Alexander to Aristotle.

The Nowell Codex, also called the Beowulf manuscript, preserves several Old English texts in sequence. Its second section begins with a fragment of The Life of Saint Christopher, followed by Wonders of the East and then the Letter of Alexander to Aristotle. Beowulf comes immediately after that letter.

The order can be confusing because Wonders of the East is often the best-known prose companion to Beowulf, and descriptions of the codex sometimes list the works without emphasizing their precise sequence. The Gospel of Nicodemus and Solomon and Saturn belong to the first codex in the larger Cotton Vitellius A XV volume, not the Nowell Codex section itself.

The manuscript is named after the sixteenth-century antiquarian Laurence Nowell. It was damaged in the 1731 Cotton Library fire, but the unique surviving manuscript of Beowulf remains preserved in the British Library.