The Questing Beast, or the Beast Glatisant (Old French: beste glatisant, Modern French: bête glatissante), 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. Description and name The strange creature has the head and neck of a snake, the body of a leopard, the haunches of a lion, and the feet of a hart. 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 variant of the medieval mythological view on giraffes, whose generic name of Camelopardalis originated from their description of being half-camel and half-leopard. In medieval literature The account from Post-Vulgate Suite du Merlin, which was taken up by Thomas Malory for his seminal Le Morte d'Arthur, has the 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 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 beast. Merlin reveals that the 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, however, 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 Beast. It is at first a futile venture, much like his love for Tristan's paramour Iseult, offering him nothing but hardship. But