Gellert, or KILLHART, the famous dog of Prince Llewellyn, which, left in charge of his infant child, after a desperate battle killed a wolf that had entered the house. The prince on his return, seeing the cradle overturned and the floor sprinkled with blood, thought the hound had killed his child, and at once plunged his sword into its side. A moment after he found the child safe under the cradle and the wolf lying dead, and saw too late the faithfulness of his dog. Gellert was buried under a tomb which stands to this day in the lovely village of Beddgelert, near the south base of Snowdon. The story is the subject of a beautiful ballad by the Hon. William-Robert Spencer (1769-1834), second son of the fifth Earl of Sunderland, who became also third Duke of Marlborough. He was the father of two colonial bishops, and the author of much fashionable poetry long forgotten, with this one ballad that will not die.
Welshmen not only show the grave of the faithful Gellert, but fix 1205 as the date at which he was given to the prince by his father-in-law. Unfortunately for them the story was long before current in Europe, with a snake instead of a wolf as the enemy. It is the first tale in the oldest Latin prose version of the Seven Wise Masters, entitled Dolopathos, written about 1184, and nearly a century before (about 1090), it had existed in Syntipas, a Greek version of the Book of Sindibád, the eastern prototype of the Seven Wise Masters. From the Latin Dolopathos, or from oral tradition, the story was taken into subsequent versions of the Wise Masters, and also into the Gesta Romanorum. It occurs also in the Liber de Donis of Etienne de Bourbon, who tells us that the grave was visited by the sick, and it reappears in the Historia Septem Sapientum Romæ, the parent of Wynkyn de Worde's History of the Seven Wise Masters of Rome (1505). The story of the Dog and the Snake thus occurs in all the western group of the Book of Sindibád; and of eastern texts or of versions derived from these, it is found in the Syriac, Persian, Greek, Hebrew, Latin (John of Capua's Directorium Humanae Vitæ), and the old Spanish (translated from an old Arabic version now lost). It does not occur in the modern Arabic version (the Seven Vazirs), which is incorporated with the Book of the Thousand and One Nights. In the Sindibád Nâma (written in 1374), a Persian metrical version, a cat is substituted for a dog. Again, in the Panchatantra version it is a mongoose or ichneumon that kills the snake; in the Hitopadesa it is a weasel. Dr Beal has translated a version from the Vinaya Pitaka of the Chinese Buddhist books (412 A.D.), itself said to be due to a much older Indian original, supposed to date from over 200 B.C. This Dr Beal considers the oldest form of the Panchatantra story. See vol. ii. of Popular Tales and Fictions (1887), by W. A. Clouston, who corrects some errors in the account in Baring-Gould's Popular Myths of the Middle Ages.