Questing Beast

The Questing Beast or the Beast Glatisant is a cross-animal monster from Arthurian legend. In the French prose cycles, and consequently in "Le Morte d'Arthur", the hunt for the Beast is the subject of quests undertaken by Pellinore and his family and achieved by 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 first accounts of the beast are found in the "Perlesvaus" and the Post-Vulgate "Suite du Merlin". The Post-Vulgate's account, 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 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 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, 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 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 a futile venture, much like his love for Tristan's paramour Iseult, offering him nothing but hardship. In the Post-Vulgate, his conversion to Christianity allows him relief from his endless worldly pursuits, and he finally slays the creature during the Grail Quest after he, Percival, and Galahad have chased it into a lake.
The "Perlesvaus" offers an entirely different depiction of the Questing Beast than the best known one, given above. 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 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 Questing 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 Questing Beast appears in many later works as well, including stories written in French, Galician, Spanish, and Italian.