Seolmundae Halmang

Seolmundae Halmang is the maker of Jeju Island, a giantess beyond measure: lying down she pillowed her head on Hallasan while her feet rested on Gwantal Island out at sea, and some villages tell of her sitting on the mountain to scrub laundry on the islet of Udo. At the beginning of things she carried earth in her skirt, load after load, and piled up the 1,950-meter Hallasan; the skirt was full of holes, and the soil that leaked out along the way settled into the island's 360-odd oreum, the small volcanic cones that dot Jeju.

Proud of her stature, she tested every deep water she met. Pools all over Jeju are said to have been measured by her, but Muljangori on the flank of Hallasan proved bottomless, and she sank from sight in the island she had built. Another line of tradition makes her the mother of the Five Hundred Generals of Yeongsil: while her five hundred sons were out foraging she fell into the great cauldron of porridge she was stirring, and when the youngest found her bones at the bottom he ran grieving to the western sea and turned to stone off the islet of Chagwido, while his brothers became the columns of rock that crowd Yeongsil ravine. A further tale has her promise the islanders a bridge to the mainland in exchange for a robe requiring one hundred bolts of cloth; the whole island mustered only ninety-nine, and the bridge was never built.

She appears in no official chronicle and survived entirely in the mouths of Jeju islanders. Scholars usually point to Jang Han-cheol's Pyohaerok of 1771, in which shipwrecked sailors sight Hallasan and cry out to its goddess, as her earliest written trace; systematic collection came only in the twentieth century, notably Hyeon Yong-jun's Legends of Jeju Island (1976). The Jeju Stone Park is laid out around her legend, and a rite in her memory is held there each May.