A grain of truth?

Every visitor to the mountain village of Beddgelert in North Wales hears the touching legend of Gelert, the faithful greyhound unjustly slain by his master Llewelyn Fawr, Prince of Wales. The legend as inscribed on the handsome nineteenth-century tombstone goes as follows:

In the 13th century Llywelyn, prince of North Wales, had a palace at Beddgelert. One day he went hunting without Gelert, "The Faithful Hound", who was unaccountably absent. On Llywelyn's return the truant, stained and smeared with blood, joyfully sprang to meet his master. The prince alarmed hastened to find his son, and saw the infant's cot empty, the bedclothes and floor covered with blood. The frantic father plunged his sword into the hounds side, thinking it had killed his heir. The dog's dying yell was answered by a child's cry. Llywelyn searched and discovered his boy unharmed, but near by lay the body of a mighty wolf which Gelert had slain. The prince filled with remorse is said never to have smiled again. He buried Gelert here.

And that is how the village came to be named Beddgelert, ‘The Grave of Gelert’.

Except it probably isn’t. The village name goes back centuries, recorded as Bedkelert in a document of 1281 (Room 1988), but according to modern scholars the story of Llewelyn and his greyhound was unknown in the area before 1784, when it was invented by David Prichard, landlord of the local hotel (Jones 2002). Mr Prichard and a group of local worthies are said to have set up the present tombstone beside an ancient cromlech, and made a tidy living from the new breed of Romantic tourists who flocked to visit the site of the legend.

Hats off to Mr Prichard for enterprise. Gelert the greyhound became immensely popular, is the subject of a famous poem (scroll down the page in the link), and is now at least as secure of his immortality as Prince Llewelyn the Great himself. Whoever the original Gelert or Celert commemorated in the village name may have been, his place in history has been well and truly usurped by a (fictional?) dog. I hope the poor man has a sense of humour.

Not everyone approved of Mr Prichard’s storytelling, prompting someone to coin the acid aphorism, “Here not a greyhound but a landlord lies.” But that judgement may be a little over-harsh. According to Malcolm Jones, “in 1484 the heraldic Rous Roll gives the arms of Wales as a helm on which the crest is a dog and cradle, which surely suggests that some version of the tale was already associated with the Welsh royal line at this date.” By 1484, of course, the princely dynasties of independent Wales were long gone, so the association may or may not have been a genuine tradition. Still, perhaps Mr Prichard was guilty of little more than borrowing an existing legend and moving it to his home town. The romantic in me would like to think so.

Room, A. Dictionary of Place Names. Bloomsbury, 1988, ISBN 0-7475-1511-5.
Jones, M. The Secret Middle Ages. Sutton, 2002, ISBN 0-7509-2685-6.

(Many thanks to Elizabeth Chadwick for recommending The Secret Middle Ages in an earlier comment!)