[3] The second corpus is the modern oral mythology (구비신화; 口碑神話, gubi sinhwa), which is "incomparably" richer than the literary tradition in both sheer quantity of material and the diversity of themes and content.

[14] For instance, the Woncheon'gang bon-puri, a Jeju shamanic narrative about a girl who goes in search for her parents and becomes a goddess, is either descended from or ancestral to a very similar mainland Korean folktale called the Fortune Quest.

The poet Yi Gyu-bo (1168–1241) mentions that both written and spoken forms of the Goguryeo foundation myth were known during his lifetime, even though the kingdom itself had fallen more than five centuries earlier.

[22] The ancient (pre-Goryeo) state-foundation myths are classified into two major types, northern and southern, though both share the central motif of a king associated with the heavens.

[27] The foundation myth of Gojoseon, the earliest Korean kingdom, is first recorded in two nearly contemporaneous works: Samguk yusa, a history compiled by the Buddhist monk Iryeon around the late 1270s, and Jewang ungi, a Chinese-language epic poem written in 1287.

The god gives the animals twenty pieces of garlic and a clump of sacred mugwort, and tells them that they will become humans if they eat them and do not see sunlight for a hundred days.

[40] The foundation myth of the northern kingdom of Goguryeo is recorded in detail in both the Samguk sagi, the oldest surviving work of Korean history, compiled in 1145,[41] and the Dongmyeongwang-pyeon, a Chinese-language epic poem written by the poet Yi Gyu-bo in 1193.

For instance, Seo Daeseok argues that Haemosu symbolizes an ancient iron-using, agricultural sun-worshipping people, that Yuhwa was a member of a riverine group of hunters, farmers, and fishermen, and that Geumwa's polity centered on hunting and pastoralism.

[53] The Jumong myth is first attested in the fifth-century Gwanggaeto Stele,[54] but the first-century Chinese text Lunheng describes a barbarian tale of a good archer who crosses a river on the backs of fish and turtles to found a new kingdom in the south.

[c][65] A beautiful princess named Heo Hwang'ok then arrives on a ship with red sails, bearing great wealth from a distant kingdom called Ayuta.

This may be done by inserting riddles, popular songs, or humorous or sexual descriptions into the retelling of the myth, or by having the accompanying musicians interrupt the narrative with often vulgar jokes.

In the 1960s, an unknown shaman in eastern Gangwon Province adapted the Simcheong-ga, a story involving a blind man, into the new Simcheong-gut narrative, recited in order to ward off eye disease.

[112] The shamanic mythology is divided into five regional traditions (무가권; 巫歌圈 muga-gwon), representing the primary variations of the two narratives the Jeseok bon-puri and the Princess Bari, which are both found throughout the Korean peninsula.

[114] A characteristic of Korean mythology is that the corpus is poorest in and near the capital of Seoul—the traditional political, economic, and cultural center of the country—and largest and most diverse in South Hamgyong Province and Jeju Island, the northernmost and southernmost peripheries respectively.

[115] Several similar myths are found in both Hamgyong and Jeju despite the great distances involved, suggesting that the two mythologies both descend from a common ancient Korean source.

[118] The South Hamgyong mythology includes a large corpus of unique shamanic narratives, of which the most important is the Song of Dorang-seonbi and Cheongjeong-gaksi, centering on a woman who attempts to meet her beloved husband after his death.

[131] The Jeju tradition also stresses the sanctity of the myths to the point that the performing shaman always sings the stories while facing the sacrificial altar, turning their back towards the musicians and worshippers.

[132] The explicit purpose of the Jeju mythology, as expressed in many narratives directly, is to make the gods "giddy with delight" by retelling them the story of their lives and deeds.

[139] A giant is often involved in the creation; in one northern narrative, the creator god Mireuk who cleaves heaven and earth is said to have eaten grain by the seom (180 liters) and to have worn robes with sleeves twenty feet (6.7 meters) long or wide.

[141] Both northern and Jeju creation myths also tell of how there were once two suns and two moons, making the world very hot during day and very cold during night, until a deity destroys one of each.

[125] The mainland versions of the narrative recount the origins of the Jeseok gods,[f] fertility deities that guarantee fortune and agricultural prosperity, as well as often Samsin, the goddess of childbirth.

[156] In the northern and East Coast-Gyeongsang traditions, the family imprisons Danggeum-aegi in a pit or stone chest, but she miraculously survives and always gives birth to triplet sons.

Many versions refer to the priest or his temple as "Golden" (황금; 黃金 hwanggeum), which may be a corruption of the archaic Middle Korean phrase han kem (한 ᄀᆞᆷ) "the Great God."

[174] When Bari finally arrives at the site of the medicinal water, she finds it defended by a supernatural guardian (of varying nature) who also knows that she is a woman, and obliges her to work for him and bear him sons.

[177] The East Coast and Gyeongsang tradition elaborates the most on Bari's quest, and portrays the guardian of the medicinal water as an exiled god who must have sons in order to return to heaven.

[182] The Princess Bari has traditionally had an informal association with the royal court, and there is some evidence that its performance was patronized by King Jeongjo for the soul of his father, Prince Sado, who starved to death in a rice chest in 1762.

[185] In a testimony to the diversity of Korean mythology, the localized narrative of the Visitors (손님네 sonnim-ne), a group of wandering male and female smallpox gods most prominent in the East Coast-Gyeongsang tradition,[h] covers entirely different themes from the tragic romance above.

By the late nineteenth century, most important rituals for village gods were being held by men according to Confucian norms, complete with invocations in Chinese instead of Korean.

The shamanic narrative best known in South Korea is the Princess Bari[211] in large part due to the work of feminists since the 1990s, who highlighted the myth's characteristics as women's literature.

[212] In 2007, Hwang Sok-yong—one of the country's most important living novelists—published Bari-degi, a novel set in the modern day about a girl named Bari, whose life parallels the myth of her divine namesake.