Cath Palug

Cath Palug (also Cath Paluc, Cath Balug, Cath Balwg, literally “Palug’s Cat”) is a monstrous feline from Welsh mythology connected with Arthurian legend. Said to have been born in Gwynedd from the great white sow Henwen of Cornwall, the kitten was cast into the sea but reached the Isle of Anglesey, where it was raised by the sons of Palug until it grew into one of the island’s three great plagues. In Welsh tradition, the cat was hunted by the warrior Cai (Kay), as implied in the fragmentary Old Welsh poem Pa Gur yv y Porthaur preserved in the Black Book of Carmarthen (before 1250), which notes that Kay fought it after it had slain 180 warriors. Outside Wales, the opponent of Cath Palug was often transposed to King Arthur himself or to other legendary heroes such as Ogier the Dane. In French literature the creature appears as Chapalu (also Capalu or Capalus) and is consistently associated with watery landscapes, including the sea in Wales, Lake Geneva, and Lac du Bourget. A variant in the Vulgate Merlin describes the beast of Lausanne as a black kitten caught in a fisherman’s net, while other accounts even portray it as a fish-cat. Some sources describe Kay warding off the creature with a polished shield, a motif that parallels a Middle English story in which Arthur raises a reflective shield that causes monstrous cats to attack their own shadows.