The Questing Beast, or the Beast Glatisant, is a cross-animal monster appearing in many medieval texts of Arthurian legend and modern works inspired by them. In the French prose cycles, and consequently in the quasi-canon of Le Morte d'Arthur, the hunt for the Beast is the subject of quests futilely undertaken by King Pellinore and his family and finally achieved by Sir Palamedes and his companions.
The strange creature has the head of a snake, the body of a leopard, the haunches of a lion, and the feet of a hart.[1] Its name comes from the great noise that it emits from its belly, a barking like "thirty couple hounds questing". Glatisant is related to the French word glapissant, 'yelping' or 'barking', especially of small dogs or foxes. The questing beast is a description of the medieval mythological view on giraffes, whose generic name of Camelopardalis originated from their description of being half-camel and half-leopard.[2] Evidence of this is shown in the Arthuriana paper, showing that the beast comes from a mistranslation of the Arabic word Zaraffa. The wrong form of the word was used, leading to the description of the beast to be described as Zurafa, or docile or graceful. This is shown in the original French text where it is described as "douce".[3]
The account from Post-Vulgate Suite du Merlin, which was taken up by Thomas Malory for his seminal Le Morte d'Arthur, has the Questing Beast appear to the young King Arthur after he has had an affair with his half-sister Morgause and begotten Mordred (they did not know that they were related when the incestuous act occurred). Arthur sees the Questing Beast drinking from a pool just after he wakes from a disturbing dream that foretells Mordred's destruction of the realm. He is then approached by King Pellinore, who confides that it is his family quest to hunt the Questing Beast. Merlin reveals that the Questing Beast had been born of a human woman, a princess who lusted after her own brother. She slept with a devil who had promised to make the boy love her, but the devil manipulated her into accusing her brother of rape. Their father had the brother torn apart by dogs as punishment. Before he died, he prophesied that his sister would give birth to an abomination that would make the same sounds as the pack of dogs that were about to kill him.
Later on in the Post-Vulgate, the Prose Tristan, and the sections of Malory based on those works, Saracen knight Palamedes hunts the Questing Beast. It is at first a futile venture, much like his love for Tristan's paramour Iseult, offering him nothing but hardship. But his conversion to Christianity allows Palamedes relief from his endless worldly pursuits, and he finally slays the Questing Beast during the Grail Quest after he, Percival, and Galahad have chased it into a lake. The Questing Beast's story can be interpreted as a symbol of the incest, violence and chaos that eventually destroys Arthur's kingdom.
The earlier Perlesvaus, however, offers an entirely different depiction of the Questing Beast. There it is described as pure white, smaller than a fox, and beautiful to look at. The noise from its belly is the sound of its offspring who tear the creature apart from the inside; the author takes the Questing Beast as a symbol of Christ, destroyed by the followers of the Old Law, the Twelve Tribes of Israel. Gerbert de Montreuil provides a similar vision of the Beast in his Continuation of Perceval, the Story of the Grail, though he says that it is "wondrously large" and interprets the noise and subsequent gruesome death by its own offspring as a symbol of impious churchgoers who disturb the sanctity of Mass by talking. The Beast appears in some other works as well, including stories written in French, Galician, Spanish, and Italian.