Questing Beast

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.

[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).

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.

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.