Obaek Janggun- Korean GroupCollective

The Giantess's Sons

Seolmundae Halmang built Jeju Island. She scooped earth from the sea floor and piled it into a mountain, and three hundred sixty-eight smaller peaks rose from the soil she spilled along the way. She shaped Hallasan with her hands. Her five hundred sons inherited her size, and they roamed the volcanic slopes while she worked to keep them fed. The labor never ended. Five hundred mouths, five hundred appetites, and one mother to fill them all.

One day she set a cauldron over a fire large enough to heat it and began preparing porridge. The pot was vast, the grain mountain-high, and she stirred the bubbling mass with an implement the size of a tree. She lost her footing on the cauldron's rim and fell into the boiling porridge. No one was there to pull her out. She died in the pot, and the porridge closed over her.

The Bottom of the Cauldron

The five hundred sons came back from every direction, hungry as always, and gathered around the cauldron. They ate eagerly. The porridge was thick and good and there was enough for all of them. Only when they scraped the bottom did they find their mother's bones. No one spoke. She had fed them for the last time, and they had not known.

The sons turned to stone where they stood. No god cursed them. No force punished them. Grief alone did it. Each son froze in his anguish, a pillar of basalt rooted to the mountainside.

The petrified Obaek Janggun are the basalt columns at Yeongsil on Hallasan's western slopes. Hundreds of columnar rock formations stand there like an assembly of giants frozen mid-stride. Other clusters of standing rocks around Jeju are attributed to the scattered sons. The island their mother built became their monument.