Chapter 1163: Witness (1)
“Did you know what kind of place it was?”
“Of course. There’s no way I wouldn’t know the legend of this body being entangled with a tiger. I also know that Ahn Ah-nine-goal was originally called Baekgol.”
Although the Ahn Ah-nine-goal legend is related to a tiger, it’s not a legend with a tiger as the main character, nor is it a good story.
Long ago, there was a region called Baekgol on the northeast side of Eosaeng Oreum, a side volcano of Hallasan, which had many large and small valleys like furrows in a field.
It is said that Baekgol was inhabited by wild beasts such as tigers, lions, and bears, making it very difficult for people to live there.
‘But in fact, there is a contradiction in this legend. Lions have never lived on the Korean Peninsula. East Asia doesn’t have a lot of grasslands, so it’s hard for lions to live there.’
Even if we don’t know about tigers and bears, lions didn’t exist on the Korean Peninsula.
It’s possible that flesh was added and exaggerated during the story’s transmission, or that it was created from someone’s imagination from the beginning.
The Korean peninsula, with its thousands of years of history, has a dizzying number of folktales in each region, and these folktales could not all coexist without contradictions.
“One day, a monk appeared in Baekgol and gathered wild beasts in a valley and warned them. He said that he would send them to a good place to live, but if they returned, he would destroy their race. And the wild beasts disappeared into a valley, and even that valley disappeared, and Baekgol became Ninety-Nine Valleys.”
Hwang Ji-ho told the story of the possible destruction of a powerful clan as if he were an old man telling a story from the past.
Hwang Ji-ho knew the Ninety-Nine Valley folktale exactly, and he was aware of the contradictions.