Page:The International Folk-Lore Congress of the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, July, 1893.djvu/370

 KOREAN FOLK-LORE.

BY HOMER B. HULBERT.

order to give an intelligent idea of Korean folk-lore, it will be necessary for me to premise it with a rapid sketch of the most probable theory as to the origin of the Korean people. This will give us a background against which to group the more salient facts of Korean lore. How or when the ancestors of the Chinese race migrated from the Iranian plateau, and found their way across the vast mountain ranges into China, is the merest matter of conjecture. Sure it is, at least, that it occurred in "the very remotest antiquity, before the first idea of a true alphabet had been evolved. Subsequently, another race swept eastward until it reached the apex of the Himalayas and the Altaic ranges. These were the progenitors of the great Turanian family. This horde did not cross the mountains but split into two great streams; one of which flowed toward the south and peopled the peninsula of India, and the other swept northward toward Siberia, where, splitting again, one part went westward toward the Urals and beyond, while the other went eastward into Mongolia, Manchouria, and finally to the shores of the Pacific. It was by some branch of this family that northern Korea was thinly settled. But let us now turn to that other branch of the same family, which peopled India. In the course of time the Sanscrit-speaking people arose somewhere to the north and east of India, and moving eastward impinged upon the earlier settlers of that great peninsula. The result was inevitable. The superior civilization of the Sanscrit-speaking race rapidly drove out or subjugated the Turanian element. Then began a grand flight. The Turanian peoples fled eastward across the Bramapootra and Irrawady into Burmah or else southward into the Deccan, where some found refuge in the hill country, where they live to-day. Others went over into 308