Questing Beast

Also Known As: also the Beast Glatisant, “the barking beast,” from Old French glatir, to bay like hounds
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: English Mythology, Medieval Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: It emits from its own belly the cry of a pack of thirty couple hounds and cannot be caught by any ordinary hunter.
Role in Mythos: A portent of sin that draws King Pellinore’s line and the knight Palamedes into a lifelong, near-hopeless pursuit.
Relation to Humans: It never attacks the knights who follow it, but it consumes their lives by luring them into an endless hunt. To Arthur it appears as a mirror of his own hidden incest, a sign rather than a threat.

The sound reaches the hunter before the shape does: a baying that seems to rise from a whole kennel of hounds in full cry, thirty couple of them, though there is not a single dog in sight. It rolls up out of the forest and hangs in the cold air, and when the creature finally breaks from the trees the noise is coming from inside its own body. It has the small flat head of a serpent set on a long neck, the spotted body of a leopard, the heavy hindquarters of a lion, and the slender cloven feet of a deer. It does not stop. It crosses the clearing at a strange uneven gait, part slither and part bound, and disappears into the far treeline with its phantom pack still crying somewhere in its gut.

King Arthur saw it first, in the Post-Vulgate romance that Thomas Malory later carried into English. He had just risen from the bed of a woman he did not yet know was his half-sister, and he had begotten on her the son who would one day kill him. He went to a spring to drink, so heavy with sleep and unease that he could barely lift his head, and there the beast came down to the water. The barking stopped while it drank. Then it raised its serpent’s head, the noise started up again inside it, and it went crashing away, and Arthur was left staring after a thing that made no sense. Merlin, when he explained it, did not soften the mirror. The beast was a sign, and its meaning was sin, and the sin it answered was Arthur’s own.

Its proper name is the Beast Glatisant, from the Old French for yelping and baying, the sharp broken cry of small hounds. English writers rendered the same idea as the Questing Beast, quest here meaning the belling of dogs on a scent rather than any noble search. The name is the whole of it. Everything memorable about the creature is bound up in the sound it cannot stop making and cannot silence, a hunt carried permanently in the belly of the hunted.

The beast first surfaces in the early thirteenth-century Perlesvaus in a stranger, more allegorical form: a white creature pursued by the very hounds it carries within it, which gives birth and is then torn to pieces by its own young, a scene the text reads as an image of Christ and an ungrateful people. The version that stuck came later, in the Post-Vulgate Suite du Merlin, and it is uglier than the riddle of the body. A king’s daughter conceived a violent love for her own brother. A devil came to her disguised as a man and promised to make the boy return her feelings, then worked her instead into accusing him of the rape she herself had wanted. Her father handed the young man to his hounds to be torn apart. Before the dogs reached him he spoke a curse against his sister: she would bear a creature that carried in its body the noise of the pack that was killing him, and that noise would never leave it. In time she gave birth, and the thing that came out of her ran for the woods with the sound of dogs already crying inside it.

So it is chased. The romances make the pursuit a kind of inheritance. King Pellinore follows the beast through Malory’s early pages, bound to it so tightly that the quest passes down his line like a debt. Later it is taken up by Palamedes, a Saracen knight not yet baptized, and the pursuit becomes the defining fact of his life, a labor with no end because the creature he wants can always outrun him. The beast leaves a wake of glory and futility. Men who could have done other things spend their years running after a noise.

The pursuit ends only once, and the way it ends is the point. During the Grail Quest, after Palamedes has finally accepted baptism, he corners the beast alongside Percival and Galahad. They drive it into a lake, and there, at last, Palamedes kills it. The animal that had outlasted whole dynasties of hunters falls the moment its principal hunter stops being a purely worldly man. The thing that could not be caught can, it turns out, be caught, but only by someone who has changed enough to no longer need to.

Its strength is that it is inexhaustible. It never tires, never turns to fight, never truly hides. It simply keeps moving, and its cry keeps drawing hunters after it, and the pursuit becomes its real work in the world: it spends the lives of good men by handing them something magnificent and impossible to want. That is the whole of its power, and it is enough to ruin them. Its weakness is buried in its own meaning. Born of a sin and sent as a sign of sin, it loses its hold on a hunter the instant that hunter is redeemed. Palamedes chasing it as an unbaptized man cannot touch it. Palamedes baptized runs it into the water and ends it. The beast was never really about the beast.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Questing Beast?

The Questing Beast is a composite monster of Arthurian legend, also called the Beast Glatisant, with the head and neck of a serpent, the body of a leopard, the haunches of a lion, and the feet of a hart. Its defining trait is the noise of a full hound pack that barks from inside its own belly. It is best known from the Post-Vulgate romances and Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur.

Why does the Questing Beast make a barking sound?

The barking, likened to thirty couple of hounds, comes from a curse tied to the beast’s birth. In the Suite du Merlin, a princess falsely accused her brother, who was then torn apart by dogs, and as he died he foretold that she would bear a creature carrying the sound of that killing pack forever. The noise is the whole meaning of its name: Glatisant and “questing” both refer to the baying of hounds.

Who hunts the Questing Beast?

King Pellinore pursues the Questing Beast in Malory, and the quest is bound to his family line as an inheritance. After Pellinore, the Saracen knight Sir Palamedes takes up the chase, and during the Grail Quest he is joined by Sir Percival and Sir Galahad. The pursuit is famous for being nearly endless, because the beast always outruns its hunters.

Does anyone ever kill the Questing Beast?

Yes. Sir Palamedes finally slays the Questing Beast during the Grail Quest, but only after he accepts Christian baptism. Together with Percival and Galahad he drives the creature into a lake and kills it there, and its defeat comes precisely when its chief hunter is no longer a purely worldly man.

What does the Questing Beast symbolize?

The Questing Beast functions as a portent of sin, most directly Arthur’s unwitting incest with his half-sister and the begetting of Mordred. It also embodies futile, unending pursuit, since it consumes the lives of knights who chase something magnificent that can never be caught. In Malory the creature is explicitly a sign whose meaning Merlin ties back to Arthur’s own conduct.