The Faithful Hound

There is one story that is dearer to me than any other.  Older than dirt, it's a favorite of the human race as well; variants of the tale exist throughout Europe and Asia, and have evolved with the cultures and the centuries, springing up now and then in modern times.  The version I love best is the one I learned first, when I was a child.

In the thirteenth century, King John of England gave his son-in-law, Prince Llywelyn of Wales, a greyhound named Gelert.  A special bond developed between the man and the dog.  One day, Llywelyn went out to hunt, but though he called for Gelert, his usually devoted companion of the chase was nowhere to be found.  Upon Llywelyn's arrival home, the dog greeted him exuberantly at the door, rubbing up against him joyfully and whimpering with pleasure.  Gelert's fur was matted and sticky.  Llywelyn noticed that the furniture was in disarray, and there was blood all over the floor.  Seeing his infant son's cradle overturned, Llywelyn realized Gelert must have mauled the child to death.  He drew his sword and, with a cry of anguish, plunged it into the dog.  Gelert looked up at him, his eyes wide with pain and confusion, and let out one plaintive howl as he died.  As the echoes of the dog's howl faded in Llywelyn's ears, he heard a baby start to cry.  Lifting the cradle, he found his son lying unharmed in his blankets.  Behind the fallen cradle was the body of a large wolf.  Llywelyn understood then what had happened: Gelert had risked his own life in a vicious struggle with the wild animal.  They had tussled around the room, knocking over the furniture as they tore at each other with teeth and claws.  Gelert had saved Llywelyn's son and heir, and Llywelyn had rewarded him with a sword between the ribs.  For all his remorse, there was nothing Llywelyn could do but bury the dog with greatest honor.  He carried his guilt with him for the rest of his life, and never smiled again.

This story has been recounted over and over again, in different ways.  The turn-of-the-nineteenth-century poet William Robert Spencer retold it in verse ("Beth Gelert; or, the Grave of the Greyhound").  More recently, a British animation company called Griffilms made the tale the subject of a charming little movie that is easily worth the two dollars it costs to rent it from Amazon Video on Demand.

The oldest of this tale's many variants is probably "The Brahman's Wife and the Mongoose," from India.  (It may also be the most tragic, as it involves a mother's hasty slaughter of her own son, and in one version, an entire family of four has met with violent death by the end.)  More than a quaint folktale, this story continues to sprout new variants in modern times, making it one of the world's oldest urban legends.

The story of St. Guinefort is contemporary with and nearly identical to the story of Gelert, with a French nobleman standing in for Llywelyn and a snake in place of the wolf.  After he slew the dog, the nobleman buried Guinefort in a well and built a shrine of sorts on top of it.  The locals came to regard the dog as a saint with special powers of protection over infants.  The Catholic Church tried to stamp out the cult of St. Guinefort, going so far as to proclaim the poor dog a heretic, dig up the bones under the shrine, and burn them, but occasional mothers continued to beseech Guinefort on behalf of their sickly children through the middle of the twentieth century.

What makes this story so special?  Researching variants of this tale online, I was almost surprised to see it characterized as a warning against hasty action, or a lesson that, as Aesop summed it up, "It is dangerous to give way to the blind impulse of a sudden passion."  Perhaps this is because I have always identified not with Llywelyn, the personification of impulsivity regretted, but with Gelert, embodiment of loyalty betrayed.  As such, I have always read this as a story about noble self-sacrifice, devotion even unto death.

On the surface, this story would seem to take a rather cynical view of such whole-souled dedication: No good deed goes unpunished!  Yet to the Faithful Hound, the act of loyalty is its own reward; Llywelyn doesn't take any more from Gelert than he was already willing to give, throwing himself into battle with a wild predator.  Symbolically, Gelert does give his life for the child; it is his dying howl that wakens the infant from his slumber and restores him to his grieving father's arms.

And in his sacrifice, the Faithful Hound transcends death, transcends the loftiness of man and the lowliness of dog.  Shrines, stone monuments, are built in his honor by the slayer who will never again smile, haunted eternally by the memory of his faithful companion's lugubrious death-cry.  The French nobleman passes namelessly into history as a proverb about folly, while Guinefort becomes a saint.

Most of what I have seen online about St. Guinefort takes a distinctly mocking tone ("Those crazy medieval peasants!  They prayed to a dead dog!"), but I have found one lovely essay that treats seriously the possibility of dog as saint (or, for that matter, heretic).  The author states that if a dog has no concept of the Divine, the labels of "saint" and "heretic" are inapplicable - but Guinefort was indeed a martyr, "to love for and faith in his master."  He concludes by holding up Guinefort as an example to humanity of pure and complete devotion; how much better it would be, he suggests, if humans could devote themselves to God as simply and unreservedly as dogs so often do to imperfect humans.

I might take it a step further, however.  I might argue that to a dog, the Alpha is the Divine.  If spirituality is the soul's thrill and surrender to greater forces, then dogs are gifted with a native spirituality of which most humans, posturing and scrambling to save face, are scarcely capable.

I like to think of Guinefort as the unofficial patron saint, not of sickly infants, but of those lowly souls among us who expect no reward for their acts of loyalty and self-sacrifice, and too often receive none but to be exploited to the last extremity.  Gelert's grave is a monument to all of us who have ever suffered an injustice silently and chosen to take the high road, remain faithful to the end to our principles and our hearts.  In my mind, the story of the Faithful Hound is a reminder that the only fate more noble than to die in the service of love and greatness, is to live in the service of love and greatness.