Description
Dr. Griffis, whose Hermit Kingdom has been a reference book for Korea for many years, here presents about a score of Korean tales retold for American children. Probably no equal area has a greater store of tales than Korea. Every hill, lake, stream and plain there appears to have its story; air, earth and water are populated with spirits whose pranks have been told to generation after generation; every old building, ruin, monument and stone figure has given cause for legends; heroes and animals so act in that peninsula, that explanations are necessary and fables regarding them are born. In such circumstances, the difficulty is not in finding stories with which to fill a book, but to select a few from many.Some of the best here given, as Why the dog and cat are enemies and the King of the sparrows, have already been done into English, but they bear re-telling. To many readers the parallels to Rip Van Winkle and Cinderella will be startling, but such parallels are common everywhere. Among the best for local color are The Voice of the Bell, The Great Stone Fire-Eater, and The Sneezing Colossus. The stories are well told and there are some pictures which in quaintness of line and color will give to the child reader a real hint of what Korean children are like.–The American Antiquarian and Oriental Journal, Vol. 34
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