A Reserch on the Cultural Implications in Turkish and Korean Legends of Lake

Abstract

Some folktales mention “A house or village full of wicked people was punished and became a lake.” It is a form of the widespread Legends that have a power of transmission on a global scale. These legends, which have the following narrative structure : Arrival of the Judge - Identification of Evil - Salvation to the Prophet and Presentation of Taboo - Violation of Taboo – Destruction, show the fate of universal human, which are difficult to escape from the marginal world symbolized by ‘evil’, as an image of ‘those who have stopped on the floor’. This implies that the archetypal consciousness of universal humanity about the human being’s necessity to move towards a life of higher value and the cognitive risks to be inevitable in the process. This is why these stories can have a global power of transmission.

As the legend has this structure, Korean legend “Jangjamot” and Turkish legend “The Village becoming a lake” are passed down. Both of them clearly show the formal typologies in terms of the narrative, the symbol, and the in-depth meaning. Therefore, it is a concrete sample to confirm the archetypical cognitive of the two people with pursuing universal values and possessing strong psycho-cultural similarities. But the more interesting parts are the differences between the two. Both forms of legends show very similar narrative structures and figure images, but also have distinct differences in their details. From these differences, it is expected to confirm the cultural differentiations between Koreans and Turkish culture.