The Questing Beast: The Noise of Thirty Hounds and the Quarry That Chooses Its Hunter
Of all the creatures that wander the Arthurian forests, one alone is defined not by what it looks like but by what it sounds like. Malory assembles its anatomy with a herald's precision: head of a serpent , body of a leopard , haunches of a lion , feet of a hart —a beast quartered like a coat of arms from four incompatible kingdoms. But its name comes from its noise: out of its belly, always, sounds the questing of thirty couple of hounds —the crying of a full hunting-pack, sixty hounds in tongue, inside it —except, the texts note with care, when the beast drinks. It is the Questing Beast , the Beast Glatisant, the Barking Beast; it appears to King Arthur at the well in the hour of his deepest trouble; it is pursued its whole literary life by exactly two knights, one after the other, neither of whom can ever take it and neither of whom can ever stop; and it dies—in the one text that dares kill it—only at the very end of the Grail age, when its work is done. No creature in romance...