It appears first of all in the Pantschatantra, a collection of stories made in Sanskrit (in India) some centuries before the Christian era. It was translated into Syriac under the title of Kalilah and Dimna. This was rendered into Arabic under the Calif Almansor (754-775), and by this means spread and became a popular story-book throughout the Mussulman world. It was translated into Persian in or about 1150, and into Greek by Simon Seth about 1080, and by John of Capua into Latin about 1270. In Spain it had been rendered out of Arabic by Raymond of Beziers in 1255, and it became a source of many collections of tales, as that of the Seven Wise Masters and the Gesta Romanorum, that circulated in the Middle Ages throughout the Western world.
The story of the faithful beast slain by its master through a hasty conclusion that it had devoured his son is found in Thibet, in Russia—almost everywhere in Asia and in Europe.
In its original form in the Pantschatantra it stands thus:—
“The wife of a Brahmin had an ichneumon in the house, as well as a child. One day she was about to go to the well to draw water, and she said to her husband, ‘Look sharply after the baby whilst I am away, lest the ichneumon do it a mischief.’ But the man went off begging, and neglected his charge. In the meanwhile a venomous black serpent approached the crib, and the ichneumon flew at it and killed it. Then the creature ran out, with its mouth bloody, to meet the woman as she returned from the well. When she saw the animal with its jaws dripping with gore she rushed to the conclusion that it had killed her son, and threw the pail at it and crushed the life out of it.”
CAPEL CURIG
An ichneumon was not an animal known in Europe, and so the translators changed it into any beast that they thought would serve—as a cat, a weasel, or a dog—and some vaguely describe it as a “domestic beast.” The oldest form of the local legend is found in a MS. dated 1592. This relates that the Princess Joan, natural daughter of King John, and wife of Llewelyn the Great, brought a noble staghound with her from England, and that the dog was one day fatally wounded by a horn-thrust when on a chase. In another MS. of the same period the dog is called Kilhart, and this seems to have been its real, an English, name, “Kill-hart.”
Capel Curig takes its designation from S. Curig; he departed by Cornwall to Brittany. In Cornwall and Wales the Latin clergy speedily displaced him from the churches he had founded, and put Cyriacus, a boy martyr of Tarsus, into his room.
But he has been better respected in his adopted land. At Perros-Guirec is his oratory on a rock in the bay, to which he was wont to retire from visitors and troublesome distractions, to read, meditate, and pray. The tide flows around the rock, so that Curig was cut off from interference by dancing waves. The wonderful spire of Kreisker at S. Pol de Léon is attached to a chapel that he is reported to have founded, and it is regarded as the finest in Brittany.