The Best Korean Myth and Fantasy Books

For anyone not familiar with the cultural history of Korea, could we start by outlining the major influences on Korean mythology?

Yes. The time of the Three Kingdoms is the ancient period of Korean history, which is around the first century BC until the seventh century. The Korean kingdoms wanted to join what was regarded as the largest civilized sphere of East Asia, which centred around China. So they accepted much of Chinese tradition, including writing in Chinese characters, and Confucianism as the main philosophical ideology, and the Chinese version of Buddhism as the main religious institution – and also its literary traditions. Unfortunately, due to war and other calamities, many of the ancient works have been lost. Korean scholars have to ask, what is Koreans imitating Chinese tradition, or adopting mythologies from China and other regions in East Asia, and what is genuinely native?

Now, I am sceptical of claims to native authenticity. So much of that is tied up with modern day nationalism, especially during the Japanese colonial era when Koreans were really in danger of losing their identity. They had already lost their political sovereignty, and the Japanese Imperial overlords were constantly telling Koreans, ‘Yours is a very poor imitative culture, only an imitation of Chinese, and we’re here to modernize.’ So Korean nationalists were trying to find some native tradition that was not Chinese, not Japanese, not Manchurian; something they could pinpoint and say, ‘This is our literary tradition. These are our stories and these are our mythologies.’

I have a great deal of personal sympathy with this, but as a contemporary historian, I don’t buy into that idea of nationality and ethnocentric views. I am fine with the idea that ancient Korean tradition was a whole mix of native traditions. I don’t even think that there was such a thing as a Korean people, because when I study the Korean Peninsula, I see lots of people moving in and out, intermarrying, warring, destroying each other’s kingdoms, founding new ones and mixing and so on. Lots of nationalists would like to believe that Korean unity and Korean native tradition goes all the way back to that era, to ancient times.

But that’s not how you see it?  

I basically do not think that the people of the peninsula had any sense of identity as one people. The kingdom was divided into three or more pieces, because there were three kingdoms – Goguryeo in the north, Baekje and Silla in the south – and a confederation of tribes called Kaya. And if you read the history of the time, they were constantly trying to kill each other, unending warfare for hundreds of years; until finally the kingdom of Silla in the south, in alliance with the Chinese Tang Dynasty, managed to destroy their rivals and create the first unified state. And their reach was still only about two-thirds of the Korean Peninsula.

It’s in the subsequent period of the Goryeo dynasty, which was founded in the 10th century, that there was some effort to bring people together and have an idea of who we were as one people, with one tradition and one myth. And in fact, the book that I just completed is on the founding myth of the Korean nation. It comes from one of the books that’s on my list, Samguk Yusa: Legends and History of the Three Kingdoms of Ancient Korea.

Perhaps we should begin with that story…? 

It’s a story about how a long, long time ago, a god came down from heaven and brought civilization to its people. One day, a bear and a tiger came to him and said, ‘We don’t want to be animals anymore. Please turn us into human beings.’ And he said, ‘Well, you have to prove to me that you have the capability of being a human, and suppress your animal urges.’ So he ordered them to go inside a cave and stay there for a hundred days eating nothing but roots and garlic. After twenty days the tiger couldn’t stand it anymore, and he left and remained an animal. But at the end of the twenty-first day, the god decided that the bear had done enough, and transformed her into a woman. And she turned out to be so beautiful that the god married her; and their son, whose name is Dangun, is recorded as the first king of Korea.

I love this story, and I wrote an entire book analysing in detail where it comes from. Of course it’s a myth, and as modern people we don’t actually believe that a god came down from heaven; but Korean nationalists, especially during the colonial period, would like to believe that it’s a fanciful allegory of the first state formation in the peninsula that really did happen about 5,000 years ago. For me, as a contemporary historian, this is problematic in two ways. The first is that according to archaeologists, there wasn’t anything remotely resembling an organized state in the Korean Peninsula until around 300 BCE. The second is that this myth comes from a 13th-century book of myths and folk tales, Samguk Yusa: Legends and History of the Three Kingdoms of Ancient Korea, and nationalists have done everything to find some kind of record of the story in ancient times – and they found nothing.

A lot of Korean people would find that shocking. From elementary school, we are taught to be proud of our 5,000 years of history, and that is a rounded up number that comes from that story about Dangun.

That’s so interesting. I see now why Legends and History is on your list… 

So to return to your original question, pre-modern Korean culture, literature, myths and traditions are a fascinating mix of native traditions combined with formal writings learned from China and other places. I’m always interested in the mix. I’m not constantly looking at things saying, ‘Is this native, or is this something that was borrowed, or is this something that was imposed on us?’ I would say instead that  Korean culture and literature in general is a mix of all of this. It uses Chinese writings and genres, but there are things about the way they’re used that is uniquely Korean, different from the way it was done in China.

That’s a really helpful orientation – thank you. Let’s talk about your first choice: James Huntley Grayson’s Myths and Legends From Korea: An Annotated Compendium of Ancient and Modern Materials.

Yes. A while ago, I was approached by an editor who asked me if I’d be interested in doing a translation of Korean fairy tales and folk tales and myths. And my response to him was that we have a problem. In the European tradition, you have people like Charles Perrault during the 18th century and the Grimm Brothers in the 19th century, who gathered these tales and wrote them down. They changed them too, because we know that the fairy tales in their original forms were disgusting, so they had to rewrite them for middle-class audiences. But if you want a compendium of European fairy tales, you can go to Perrault’s Mother Goose or the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tales. But Korea has never had a figure equivalent to Perrault or the Brothers Grimm, and there isn’t a text that I could translate. These tales are all scattered in different ways, and lot of them are just modern renderings of stories that we are familiar with from oral tradition, or come from adaptation into musical form… So, that was a problem!

This book is the single most comprehensive collection in the English language of Korean myth and folk tales. And it’s huge. It’s freaking huge.

It’s done for scholarly purposes. It’s not something your readers will be able to pick up and just read through to enjoy. Because it has translations and variations, it then has very technical scholarly discussions of different aspects of it. So this is not for fun reading, but I feel that I must include it in the list, because this is the single most comprehensive book available in English.

Scholars can look into this. The research is excellent. For academic audiences who are looking for a compendium of these stories and good scholarly discussions, this is the book to go to.

Your next choice looks like the more accessible counterpart… Tell us about Heinz Insu Fenkl and Bella Myong-Wol Dalton-Fenkl’s The Korean Myths: A Guide to the Gods, Heroes, and Legends.

So this is not as comprehensive, and it’s not meant to be, nor is it meant to be academic and scholarly. But it’s a fun read, written by this wonderful Korean-American novelist Heinz Insu Fenkl and his daughter. For more informal readers who are not approaching this from a scholarly, academic angle, I think this would be the book to go to for the major Korean myths and folk tales and stories.

This book takes us all the way up to modern Korean artistic output. Will fans of modern Korean fantasy recognise a lot in the older storytelling?

Absolutely. A lot of these stories have been the basis of K-dramas and K-films, so they’ll recognize them, and it’ll give them a better understanding of what’s going on. The characters and themes appear in things like K-Pop Demon Hunters. So this will just enhance the enjoyment of something fans already enjoy anyway.

Your third choice we already touched on… Could you tell us more about the Samguk Yusa: Legends and History of the Three Kingdoms of Ancient Korea?

This work is attributed to a Buddhist priest by the name of Iryon. In the late 13th century, he felt compelled to collect a whole bunch of stories, many of them fantastic in nature, dealing with great kings and Buddhist priests. There are also accounts of miracles and strange occurrences and so on. It’s the first real collection of stories that we have in the Korean tradition.

In the earlier part of the century, the Korean Peninsula had been invaded by the Mongols. After a long, long fight against them, the Korean kingdom of Goryeo surrendered to them. The Mongolians didn’t get rid of the kingdom completely, but made a lot of adjustments, and they kept a tight watch on what the Korean kings were doing.

A lot of intellectuals at the time felt that they were in a serious crisis, which could lead to the complete extinction of Korean tradition. So that’s one of the reasons why this guy Iryon – and I’m thinking probably a bunch of other co-writers and co-collectors – wrote this book: preserving native stories to remind Koreans, even during those dark times, that we are different. We’re not Mongolians. We have our own traditions. These are stories that come from the people and from our land.

That’s why the very first story is about the first King who’s born of a god and a woman who used to be a bear – a marriage of the above and the below, and a special semi-divine figure being born. It’s desperately trying to preserve native tradition in a time of great crisis for the Korean people.

In your own novel, The Melancholy of Untold History, a historian has to confront nationalist myth-making. Was this interest in fabrication the starting point for you?

We ourselves right now are in a period of deep crisis, with false views of history happening all over the place. That’s been around since ancient times, but because of the internet, the spread of false stories about the past has really accelerated. That’s something I talk about with my students all the time. I teach a course called Historical Myth, all about wrong things people believe about the past. So absolutely, that is of great concern to me – the struggle of historians to find out what truth is, at a time when that has become a dangerous thing.

[Spoiler alert]

More trivially, I’ll tell you a funny story… You know The Onion, the satirical news site? The single funniest article I’ve ever read on The Onion is one where historians have a press conference, and they tearfully admit that they made up Ancient Greece. And I laughed so hard. But then I thought about it – how could one actually do that? What would it take for a very strong and powerful man to just invent an entire era? What kind of resources would be needed? I came to the realization they would need to commit a massacre, because so many people would have to be involved in the task, and all those people would need to die. And once I realised that, I knew I had a story.

The book moves between the historian’s time period, an earlier time period, and myth… Can you say a little about the myth you were drawing on? It wasn’t only Korean, right? 

The book is perhaps even more inspired by Chinese pre-modern fictional adaptations of myths. For reasons I won’t get into, I have an entire fictional East Asia worked out in my mind! The country that the historian comes from is an alternate version of China, which isn’t one country, but is instead a bunch of democratic countries that are tied together EU-style. So it’s a much more benevolent path that the country took. And Korea is there, but it’s under the name of Pristine Morning, which is what Joseon (the last royal dynasty of Korea) actually means. It was kind of implausible to think about a Korean king doing the things I needed for my story, because of the resources involved – but a Chinese emperor could.

So in preparation for writing this novel, I spent a lot of time gulping up all the traditional Chinese novels that could be categorized as classic fantasy novels. The most famous one is Journey To The West, which is this massive novel about a monkey with superpowers – and if you read that, you’ll see where I got the idea for the naked sky baby. And even though that story is a large, noble enterprise, trying to bring back Buddhist texts from the west, there are also very irreverent fart jokes in there. I love that. I love the epic, wild, imaginative stories, along with all the folk tales. And there are other great classic Chinese novels in there too, like Outlaws of the Marsh.

Your next two choices move us forward into this era of classic novels, but returning to Korea… The first is one you translated. Tell us about The Story of Hong Gildong.

Yes. I’m recommending this, and Heinz Insu Fenkl’s translation of The Nine Cloud Dream, not only because these are the two most famous classic novels from the Joseon Dynasty, but also because they are two completely different types – and I had to write a whole book arguing this.

Through most of the Joseon Dynasty, which was over 500 years, the literacy rate was very low, well below 10%. It was really exclusive to the Yangban aristocracy, and some secondary-class people, non-aristocratic elites. For the vast majority of people who were peasants and artisans and merchants, there was no need for it. So all the literature that we get from the Joseon dynasty was written by the Yangban aristocracy – including my next choice, The Nine Cloud Dream. They have a very specific way of writing. They revere Chinese literature, and in terms of literary style and format, they are imitating them, although I would argue that you can find unique elements as well.

But then something really interesting happened in the 18th century, which in Korea was a very special time period: a time of prolonged peace and prosperity, for a number of reasons, one of which is that there were two surprisingly good, able and caring kings. So what we see, especially in the second half of the 18th century, is a rather surprising level of social mobility, especially among the upper section of the commoners. All of a sudden they had leisure time, and were able to teach themselves and their children how to read and write. For the first time in Korean history, you got commoners writing novels for commoner readership in the native phonetic script, rather than Chinese characters.

To me this is fascinating. My main training as a historian was in Europe, and a very similar thing was going on in 18th-century England, which created the modern realist novel – the expansion of the middle class and commerce and so on. All of a sudden people like Daniel Defoe and Henry Fielding could actually make a living just by writing fiction. The literature written by commoners is very different from the kind of fiction that was written by the aristocracy – less didactic, not as moralistic, and way more sensationalist. If you were a yangban writer, you did not write literature for profit, because there were just not enough literate people for you to be able to make money. You wrote poetry, you wrote fiction, you wrote history and you wrote philosophical essays for reputation, to demonstrate your prowess as a literary man. But these novels written by commoners were definitely for profit, and as a result, they can be much more salacious and sensationalist – and from a modern perspective, way more fun.

And you think The Story of Hong Gildong belongs to this newer tradition?

Yes. So, The Story of Hong Gildong… it’s based on a real bandit who caused a lot of trouble in the kingdom. According to royal records, he was captured in the year 1500. We don’t know what happened after that, and there’s a lot of reason to suppose that he was really a pretty bad guy who caused a lot of damage, but by the time we get to the 19th century and this anonymous writer decided to write a story about him… I kind of hate doing this, but the easiest way to explain the novel is that he becomes the Korean Robin Hood. He’s a righteous bandit who keeps humiliating authority figures like the police, and even tricks the king a couple of times. It’s not exactly a radical subversive work. But I really do believe that there’s an element of catharsis for the commoner writer and commoner readers, reading about this guy causing chaos in the kingdom and repeatedly beating authority figures.

As I said, it’s not that radical, because at the end Hong Gildong becomes a king of his own kingdom. A lot of Koreans who have never read this novel think that he’s some kind of proto-socialist communist rebel, but he’s not. That tells me that they never actually read the book.

So your last choice is in the other, aristocratic tradition. Can you tell us more about The Nine Cloud Dream?

The Nine Cloud Dream is attributed to Kim Man-jung (although in my own research, I think that’s not as clear as people think it is), and it has all the hallmarks of a very erudite work written by a Yangban aristocrat. It’s a Buddhist tale about reincarnation and sin and redemption and so on, which gets a little bit repetitive, but that’s just the way a lot of those stories went – it’s very formalized. There are certain themes that are repeated over and over again, with an emphasis on certain virtues that come straight out of Confucian philosophy, so it’s using a Buddhist framework to talk about Confucian ideals.

It’s about a monk who’s trying to gain enlightenment, but at some point he dies and transitions into another life. He leads his entire other life, and during the course of it, he encounters a series of women with whom he has various different kinds of relationship. And then the whole thing turns out to be a classic of the dream narrative genre, because he wakes up and realises that this entire life that he had was a mere dream. He didn’t die and wasn’t reborn as this man, and the entire thing held a lesson for him about the nature of life and death and reincarnation and so on.

It’s way more didactic and repetitive and formulaic than the fun Story of Hong Gildong. But it’s the prime example of fiction that comes from the upper classes. And it is a full-length novel – if The Story of Hong Gildong was written today, its length would label it as a novella.

When I was picking these books for you, I left out other stories that I like – The Story of Jeong Unchi, for example. But for the purpose of your readers getting the full perspective of fantastic tales from Korea, I felt obligated to include one from the commoners and one from the aristocracy.

It’s been a fantastic overview and introduction – thanks very much.