Early Songs and Myths

The oldest Korean literature is not a shelf of books. It is a foundation story told in a thirteenth-century monk's collection, a royal history written in Chinese, and twenty-five songs, many of them known only because someone copied them down centuries later. This chapter looks at what each of those is, what the sources say about it, and where they leave the reader unsure.

Dangun: A Foundation Story

The Dangun article tells the myth in these steps. Hwanin, a heavenly lord, has a son, Hwanung, who wants to live on earth. Hwanung descends to Taebaeksan with 3,000 followers and founds a settlement, teaching laws, medicine and farming. A tiger and a bear ask to become human. Hwanung tells them to eat only garlic and mugwort and avoid the sun for 100 days. The tiger gives up; the bear endures and becomes a woman, Ungnyeo. She prays under a sacred birch tree for a child, Hwanung marries her, and their son, Dangun Wanggeom, founds the kingdom of Joseon, later called Gojoseon, with a walled city, Asadal, near Pyongyang. The article adds that the location is disputed.

Where the myth is recorded

• The earliest recorded version is in the thirteenth-century Samguk yusa, which, the article says, claims to cite a lost Korean record, Gogi, and China's Book of Wei. The article notes that the surviving Book of Wei has no Dangun record.
• Similar versions appear in Jewang un-gi by Yi Seunghyu (1224 to 1300) and in later Joseon texts.

Dates and uses

The article says Dangun's rule is usually dated to 2333 BCE, based on the Tongguk tonggam (1485), and that other sources tie his reign to the legendary Emperor Yao with varying details. It records that South Korea's old Dangi era began in 2333 BCE, and that North Korea dates the founding to the early thirtieth century BCE and, after a 1994 excavation of a supposed tomb, now claims he was a real historical person, which the article says Kim Il Sung insisted on. That is all this course says about North Korea in this chapter. The lead calls him the "legendary founder and first king of Gojoseon", and the article says South Korean scholarship treats him as a head of Gojoseon society with priestly traits.

My reading, not stated in the article: a story that was written down some three thousand years after its supposed date, and that governments later used to date their own founding, is a good first example of why this course separates the story from the record.

Two Books from the Goryeo Period

Samguk sagi

The article says it draws mainly on the Gu Samguksa and older records such as the Hwarang Segi, most of which are lost, and quotes extensively from Chinese dynastic histories. It does not cite Japanese chronicles such as the Kojiki, and the article offers, as a possibility only, that the compiler may not have known of them or chose not to cite them. It says the reconstruction of the Goguryeo language is "tentative". The article uses two spellings of the compiler's name and two dates for completion and does not reconcile them.

Samguk yusa

"Yusa" means a supplementary text, meant to add to the Samguk sagi. The article calls it "the earliest extant record of the Dangun legend". It says the earliest extant printed edition is from 1512, and it preserves fourteen hyangga. It warns that "the reliability of Samguk yusa is questionable", because of its mythical content and the roughly six centuries between the Three Kingdoms period and its composition. Some scholars think Il-yeon wrote only the fifth fascicle, and a disciple, Muguk, may have expanded the compilation; a chronology in the 1512 edition may be a fourteenth-century addition. It focuses mainly on Silla's upper class, with commoners as about eight percent of narrative protagonists.

Hyangga: Songs in a Borrowed Script

The Hyangga article describes them as "poems written using Chinese characters" in a system called hyangchal, during the Unified Silla and early Goryeo periods, and says they are sometimes called "Silla songs". The name combines the character for "back-country" or "rural village", which the Silla people used for their own country, with the character for "song". Only a few survive: 14 in the Samguk yusa and 11 by the monk Kyunyeo (tenth century). A late-ninth-century collection, the Samdaemok, is lost. That agrees with Chapter 1, which gave 25 survivors.

What they are about

The article says 18 of the 25 reflect Buddhist themes, and death is another major theme, with many eulogies for monks, warriors and family members. It names four with approximate dates: Seodong yo (about 600), Cheoyong ga (about 879), Heonhwa ga (about 702 to 737, by an old herdsman) and Mo Jukjilang ga (about 692 to 702), and lists others such as Jemangmae ga and Won wangsaeng ga. Authorship is uncertain for some, for example Won wangsaeng ga.

Form and the problem of reading them

• Forms. Since Shinpei Ogura's 1920s work they have been grouped as single-quatrain, two-quatrain or ten-line forms. Kim Sung-kyu (2016) proposed only two (a single quatrain and a two-tercet form) and argues that apparent eight-line forms come from a line lost in transmission.
• Uncertainty. The article says "The structure of hyangga is not completely understood." The only contemporary comment on their form is ambiguous, and a key phrase "remains unresolved".
• Readings. The same poem can be read as ten lines or as six, and translators such as Peter H. Lee and Alexander Vovin read the form differently. The article gives no single authoritative reading.
• Dating. They are "believed to have been first written in the Goryeo period, as the style was already beginning to fade", which the article states without detail.

For an English reader, that last point matters. The poems were written with Chinese characters used to spell Korean sounds and meanings, so even the text has to be deciphered before it can be translated. I do not quote a translation here, because I read none and the article gives none.

Exercises

Next chapter: Writing in Chinese, Writing in Hangul.