Tigers in Korean Culture – From Myths to Modern Stories
From a mythic tiger to a smash-hit movie character K-pop Demon Hunters seems to be everywhere these days—people can’t stop talking about it. It’s so popular that even my pastor mentioned it once during service ;) At home, my child has probably watched it more than ten times, and on car rides we end up looping “Golden” and “Sodapop.” In my previous post, I looked at the bear and tiger in the Dangun myth. With the tiger character “Derpy” from K-pop Demon Hunters gaining so much love, I wanted to talk about tigers in Korean culture today. In the simple version of the myth, the bear endures and becomes human, while the tiger gives up and returns to the mountains. Today’s story follows how the tiger survived in the Korean imagination—taking on many forms—and became a special symbol. Fierce and formidable In premodern Korea, people called the tiger the “mountain lord,” sangun (산군), the master of the mountains. Tigers roamed our ranges commonly up through the Joseon era, so people...