Korea's richest myths were sung by shamans and not printed until 1930
Korean mythology lives in two very different forms. One is a set of royal founding legends preserved for centuries in historical chronicles. The other, far larger, is a living tradition of sacred songs performed by shamans in rituals, revised with every performance and often quietly subversive of patriarchy. Scholars largely ignored it until the 1960s.
The written corpus consists mostly of state-foundation myths recorded in works such as the thirteenth-century Samguk yusa. They are so thoroughly historicised that fact and legend blur together. The story of Dangun, legendary founder of Gojoseon, the first Korean kingdom, has become the founding myth of the whole nation. Scholars split these tales into two families: northern myths, like that of Jumong of Goguryeo, whose founder is born to a heavenly father and an earthly mother, and southern ones, like Hyeokgeose of Silla, who descends from the sky as an object and later marries a mortal woman.
The oral corpus is described as incomparably richer in both quantity and variety. Shamans, often women known as mansin, sing these narratives during ceremonies called gut to invoke the gods, pleasing the deities and entertaining the audience at once. For participants they are sacred truth rather than old stories. They cover the primordial history of the world, humans rising to divinity and gods punishing the impious, and new narratives have appeared since the 1960s.
There are five regional traditions, with Jeju Island in the south especially distinctive. Two stories appear almost everywhere. In the Jeseok bon-puri, a girl is made pregnant by a Buddhist priest with supernatural power, probably a sky god in origin, and bears triplets who become gods. In the tale of Princess Bari, a daughter abandoned by her father for being a girl later brings her dead parents back to life with the flower of life.
Early scholarship, led by historians such as Choe Nam-seon, focused on the royal myths. Kim Yeol-gyu, Hyeon Yong-jun and Seo Daeseok opened up the shamanic songs from the 1960s, and since the 1990s research has turned to village-shrine myths, comparisons with neighbouring cultures and feminist readings.
Source: Korean mythology
