Why Tigers Never Disappeared from Korean Culture
After disappearing from the Dangun myth, what role did the tiger come to play in Korean culture? This essay explores how the tiger survived not in legend, but in everyday language—through proverbs—revealing how Korean ways of thinking and cultural memory have been preserved over time. If the previous article examined the story of the bear and the tiger in the Dangun myth, this piece takes us to what comes next. In the myth, the bear becomes human, while the tiger ultimately fails and vanishes from the story. Yet intriguingly, the tiger never disappears from Korean culture. Instead, in the centuries following the myth, the tiger lives on in proverbs—embedded in everyday language as a way of explaining how the world works. This essay is written to explore precisely that transformation. Where Did the Tiger Go After Being Excluded from the Myth? In the Dangun myth, the tiger is a being that fails to become part of civilization. Unable to endure the taboo, it is excluded fr...