<거타지>, <작제건>, <왕수재용녀취득설>에 나타난 ‘영웅과 요괴’의 성격과 의미

초록

This study compares the main characters’ heroic qualities and monster identities in Geotaji, Jakjegeon, and Wang Sujae Married the Daughter of the Dragon King. Geotaji tells a narrative that compromises a folktale-style story, in which the main character achieves success with his assistant’s help, as mythological heroic narratives are caught in historical events. Jakjegeon tells a tale that entangles a folktale-style story with mythological imagination to sanctify the historical facts of the founding Goryeo. Wang Sujae Married the Daughter of the Dragon King is a novel presenting a new hero who overcomes a crisis independently by severing ties with his parents’ generation and pioneering his destiny for himself based on a hybrid of history, interesting stories based on unofficial history, and realism-style Jeons. In Geotaji and Jakjegeon, a fox monster attacks the dragon king using Buddhist spells. Thus, it demonstrates a trace of the mixture between the fox faith and Buddhism and a way to maintain the life of the fox faith by disguising it as Buddhism. Fox and dragon god faiths existed as indigenous faiths before the introduction of Buddhism and increasingly developed a confrontational relationship with Buddhism. In Geotaji, the old fox is described as an evil god with a heretical ability called a spell and an opponent that the hero defeats by serving a good god. The old fox of Jakjegeon is similar to that of Geotaji, but she disturbs the established order represented by the dragon king and Buddha-dharma and ends up being eliminated by the hero oriented toward founding a new nation. In Wang Sujae Married the Daughter of the Dragon King, the nine-tailed fox appears like a beautiful woman with strange and mysterious abilities; however, she is described as a monster threatening the human order and is exterminated by the hero, thus protecting the human realm. Heroes’ changing characters and monster transformations in Geotaji, Jakjegeon, and Wang Sujae Married the Daughter of the Dragon King provide essential clues to understanding tales about exterminating monsters in a diachronic way.

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