Seolmundae Halmang (설문대할망)

A giantess who descended from the heavens. She gathered earth in the folds of her skirt and poured it into the sea, and from that pouring an island was made. A few handfuls that spilled as she worked became Hallasan, and the scraps that fell through the holes in her skirt became the oreum hills scattered across the land. The very shape of Jeju is the trail of what she let slip while she labored.

No language can fully reckon the scale of her body. When she lay down with Hallasan as her pillow, her toes reached the island of Gwantal, and it is said that no sea she ever waded into rose above her knees. When she did her washing, she would spread her cloth across Gwantal, brace one hand on the summit of Hallasan, and scrub with her feet — and this rumor still passes from the lips of the old people of Jeju.

She was a being both divine and mortal. The old stories cast a shadow of mortality across her. One tale holds that she fell into the cauldron while boiling gruel to feed her five hundred sons and drowned there; another says she was buried in the earth and became Maego Halmang, the grandmother of the soil. The creator was swallowed by the land she had made.

In the eighteenth-century record known as the Pyohaerok, there is an account of sailors caught in a storm who looked toward Hallasan and called out to Seonmago (詵麻姑). The cry for survival was not directed at the mountain — it was directed at her, who was the mountain itself. Her name shifted from place to place — Seonmundae Halmang, Semyeongdwi Halmang, Seolmandu-go — but the direction in which people called was always the same.

Even now, when people come upon the strange rock formations along the Jeju coast, the oreum hills that rise without explanation, the stretches of sea that go suddenly shallow, they speak of it in low voices. This is where Halmang passed through.