COLLECTION
Explore the stories, beliefs, and extraordinary beings of this tradition.
A poor man mends a swallow's broken legs and its gourd seed makes him rich; his greedy brother breaks a swallow's legs on purpose, and his gourds ruin him. Yet the story does not stop at Nolbu's ruin: the oldest copy and the great pansori libretto end with Heungbu taking his brother in.
Read story 10 min readAfter a birth, Korean families set the first bowl of rice and seaweed soup before Samsin Halmeoni, the grandmother who gives children and guards them while they are small. How she won the post is sung only in Jeju: a flower contest in heaven, lost by the Dragon King's daughter.
Read story 10 min readA tiger came to the door in their mother's clothes, and a brother and sister escaped up a rope from heaven to become the sun and the moon. Koreans place such stories in the days when tigers smoked tobacco, yet this one was first written down in the twentieth century, and the oldest full text we have read gives the sun to the brother.
Read story 11 min readIn a song of Jeju Island, a magistrate's runner named Gangnim went down alive to arrest the king of the dead, and the king kept him as his messenger. Television dressed Korea's messengers of death in black; in the rites they were soldiers, and a temple painting of 1676 shows them in red and green beside their horses.
Read story 11 min readShe carried soil in her skirt to build Hallasan, and drowned in a bottomless pool on its slopes. Her traces are all over Jeju, yet the shamans have no song of her own, and scholars still argue over whether she was ever a goddess.
Read story 10 min readA white horse knelt by a well, then rose into the sky and left an egg. The boy inside became the first king of Silla, and two more royal houses began with a chest from the sea and a golden chest in a tree.
Read story 13 min readThey wrestle travellers all night and turn out to be an old broom by morning; they knock gold out of a club and run from the crack of a hazelnut. Their name is in Korean books from 1447, but the horns they wear today, a Korean folklorist argues, were drawn for them in colonial-era school readers.
Read story 10 min readA voice on a hilltop told nine chiefs to sing to a turtle, and six golden eggs came down from the sky. The first boy out founded Gaya, and his queen sailed in under a red sail from a land called Ayuta.
Read story 13 min readA king had his seventh daughter shut in a box and thrown into a river because she was not a son, and she came back from the other world with the water that raised him from his bier. Korean shamans still sing her story at the rites for the dead, and count her as their ancestor.
Read story 9 min readKorea's oldest books know the fox as an omen, a demon in a monk's robe and, once, a mountain god who helped a famous monk. The gumiho who longs to become human, and counts the years or the livers until she does, comes mostly from television.
Read story 13 min readA river god's daughter, shut away by a king, was followed by the sunlight and laid an egg. The boy who broke out of it fled across a bridge of fish and turtles and founded Goguryeo, and the kingdom itself carved his story in stone in 414.
Read story 11 min readA god came down from heaven, and a bear kept to a dark cave until she became a woman. Their son Dangun founded Joseon. The oldest text that tells it was written in the 1280s, and it quotes two books no one has ever found.
Read story 6 min read
