Myths and Legends from Korea: An Annotated Compendium of Ancient and Modern Materials

"A while ago, I was approached by an editor who asked me if I’d be interested in doing a translation of Korean fairy tales and folk tales and myths. And my response to him was that we have a problem. In the European tradition, you have people like Charles Perrault during the 18th century and the Grimm Brothers in the 19th century, who gathered these tales and wrote them down. They changed them too, because we know that the fairy tales in their original forms were disgusting, so they had to rewrite them for middle-class audiences. But if you want a compendium of European fairy tales, you can go to Perrault’s Mother Goose or the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tales. But Korea has never had a figure equivalent to Perrault or the Brothers Grimm, and there isn’t a text that I could translate. These tales are all scattered in different ways, and lot of them are just modern renderings of stories that we are familiar with from oral tradition, or come from adaptation into musical form… So, that was a problem. This book is the single most comprehensive collection in the English language of Korean myth and folk tales. And it’s huge. It’s freaking huge . It’s done for scholarly purposes. It’s not something your readers will be able to pick up and just read through to enjoy. Because it has translations and variations, it then has very technical scholarly discussions of different aspects of it. So this is not for fun reading, but I feel that I must include it in the list, because this is the single most comprehensive book available in English. Scholars can look into this. The research is excellent. For academic audiences who are looking for a compendium of these stories and good scholarly discussions, this is the book to go to."