몽골 식물민담 고찰

A Review of Mongolian Plant Folklore

Among the oral literature of Mongolia, the world’s treasure trove of oral literature, there are twelve botanical folktales, which are rare in volume but in a metonymic sense. From this, it is hoped that the singularity can be extracted from the title and sanction of each folktale, and the position of the person between the background and the speaker. The main material of Mongolian botanical folktales was typical of arboreal tales, which represent the actual plant ecosystem of Mongolia. It is symbolized that man was the beneficiary of eternal life by divine intent, and that the mistakes of the birds and insects that carry him accidentally turn conifers into evergreens. In this, he was able to read the inner world of nature, which symbolized the alienation of human beings by personifying the mediated creatures that connect nature—birds and insects. This is because human beings are lightly portrayed as narrators of the narrative, but their evergreens result in the world tree that secures the relationship between the gods. The trees, the title of this folktale and sanctioned in terms of non-literary aspects, are a tool of an exorcist, a constantly used by shamans in Central Asia and Altai regions, embodying a shamanic view of the natural world. It is used as a world tree to meet God in order to secure the mediating opportunities of “the earth, the seat of man” and the “sky, the seat of God,” in nature—evergreen—and is significant as a universe. In Mongolian plant folklore, a person who was a beneficiary of the gods but moved away from it due to accidental mistakes of living things or the intervention of the surrounding environment meets God as an evergreen world tree. In these literary and imaginative Mongolian plant folktales, one can read the cultural framework that shows the priority values of the Mongolian people, and it can be said that it represents a personality type as a world literature.