Arthur and the Questing Beast by Henry Justice Ford (1904) and Wodan’s Wild Hunt by Friedrich Wilhelm Heine (1885)

(15) QUESTING BEAST & WILD HUNT

I just can’t resist their evocative names, despite it being arguable whether they were actually villains. The Wild Hunt in particular seems more of a chaotic force.

Sadly, the questing beast is not so named because it was the subject of a quest but for the French word glatisant – hence its alternative name of the Beast Glatisant – related to or signifying barking or yelping, the noise the Beast made.

The Beast itself was a hybrid beast like a chimera – that is a single beast seemingly composed of different animal parts – albeit one often interpreted as a giraffe, from their medieval description as half camel and half leopard.

The Beast doesn’t feature in the main part of Arthurian legendary canon but pops up as cameo as it were, with the hunt for it as the subject of quests “futilely undertaken by King Pellinore and his family and finally achieved by Sir Palamedes and his companions”.

Of course, I also can’t resist matching the innuendo of questing beast with the adventurous bed. On that note, questing beast overlaps nicely with the innuendo of wild hunt.

“The Wild Hunt is a folklore motif occurring across various northern, western and eastern European societies, appearing in the religions of the Germans, Celts, and Slaves” – typically involving “a chase led by a mythological figure escorted by a ghostly or supernatural group of hunters engaged in pursuit. The leader of the hunt is often a named figure associated with Odin in Germanic legends but may variously be a historical or legendary figure like Theodoric the Great, the Danish king Valdemar Atterdag, the dragon slayer Sigurd, the psychopomp of Welsh mythology Gwyn ap Nudd, Biblical figures such as Herod, Cain, Gabriel, or the Devil, or an unidentified lost soul. The hunters are generally the souls of the dead or ghostly dogs, sometimes fairies, Valkyries or elves”.

That list of Wild Hunt leaders is not exhaustive either – indeed, it could be the subject of its own top ten.

“Seeing the Wild Hunt was thought to forebode some catastrophe such as war or plague, or at best the death of the one who witnessed it. People encountering the Hunt might also be abducted to the underworld or the fairy kingdom…According to scholar Susan Greenwood, the Wild Hunt “primarily concerns an initiation into the wild, untamed forces of nature in its dark and chthonic aspects.””

RATING:

A-TIER (TOP TIER)