Foolish Ondal and Princess Pyeonggang

In the kingdom of Goguryeo, in the days of King Pyeongwon, there lived a little princess who cried more than any child in the palace. She cried when she was hungry and she cried when she was tired. She cried when it rained and she cried when it didn't.

Her father the king loved her, but the crying wore him out. Whenever she began to wail, he would wag his finger at her and say, “If you keep crying like that, no nobleman will ever want you. I shall have to marry you off to Foolish Ondal!”

Everyone in the city knew Foolish Ondal. He was a poor young man who lived with his blind mother in a tumbledown hut, and he went from door to door begging for food to feed her. His clothes were rags and his shoes were falling apart, and people laughed at his simple, open face. Children ran after him in the street shouting “Fool! Fool!” and he only smiled at them. The king’s threat always made the little princess stop crying, at least for a while.

It became a joke in the palace. Whenever the princess’s lip began to wobble, someone would whisper, “Careful, or it’s Ondal for you!” and the courtiers would laugh. The king said it so often that he forgot he had ever said it at all. But the princess never forgot.

The princess keeps her word

The princess grew up. When she was sixteen, the king chose a husband for her from one of the greatest noble families in the land.

To everyone’s astonishment, the princess refused.

“Father,” she said, “all my life you told me I would marry Ondal. A common man does not go back on his word. How can a king? I will marry Ondal, as you promised.”

The king was furious. “If you will not obey me,” he roared, “then you are no daughter of mine. Go where you like!”

So the princess left the palace with nothing but the jewels she wore. She asked her way through the city until she found the little hut where Ondal lived. Only his blind mother was at home. The old woman reached out and felt the princess’s soft hands and smelled the fragrance of her clothes, and was frightened. “You smell of the palace,” she said. “My son is poor and plain. You must not stay here.”

“He is not here now,” the old woman went on. “He was so hungry that he went up into the mountains to strip bark from the elm trees to eat, and he has not come back yet.”

The princess thanked her and set off at once toward the mountains. At the foot of the hills she met a young man coming down the path, bent under a great load of elm bark. His clothes were in tatters. His face was the face from the street, the face the children laughed at. She stopped in front of him and told him who she was, and why she had come.

Teaching Ondal

When Ondal came home and found a princess in his yard, he thought she must be a ghost or a fox spirit, and he ran away. But she waited outside all night, and in the morning she explained everything, and at last he and his mother let her stay.

“This is no place for a young woman,” Ondal had stammered on the mountain path, backing away from her. “You can’t be a real person. You must be a ghost, or a fox in disguise. Don’t come near me!” And he had hurried home and shut the gate behind him.

So the princess spent the night outside the gate, alone in the dark. In the morning she went in and explained everything again, to both of them. Still they hesitated. “My son is too lowly to be the husband of a noble lady,” said the old mother. “And our house is too poor for you.”

The princess answered with an old saying. “Even a single measure of grain can be pounded and shared. Even a single length of cloth can be sewn and shared. If two people are of one heart, why must they be rich and noble before they can be together?”

There was nothing Ondal and his mother could say to that.

The princess sold her jewels. With the money she bought land, a house, servants, oxen and all they needed to live. Then she sent Ondal to buy a horse from the royal herds, and she cared for it until it was strong.

“Don’t buy a horse from the market,” she told him. “Find one of the king’s horses that has been sent away because it is sick and thin, and buy that.” Ondal did as she said, and brought home a scrawny, drooping horse that no one else had wanted. The princess fed it with her own hands and tended it every day, and the horse grew fat and strong and fast. She looked after his blind mother as tenderly as if she were her own. And every day she taught Ondal: how to ride, how to shoot a bow, how to read and how to think. He turned out to be a quick and willing learner. The fool, it seemed, had never really been a fool.

The hunt on Nangnang hill

Every year, on the third day of the third month, the king of Goguryeo held a great hunt on Nangnang hill. Nobles and warriors rode out to show their skill, and the game they caught was offered to heaven.

That spring a stranger rode out among them on a fine horse. He galloped faster than anyone and brought down more game than all the rest. The king called him over and asked his name.

“Ondal,” said the young man.

The courtiers looked at one another. Ondal? Foolish Ondal, the beggar boy? But the young man on the fine horse sat straight and proud, and there was nothing foolish about him now.

The king was amazed. Not long after, an army from the west invaded Goguryeo, and Ondal rode at the very front of the king’s troops. He fought so fiercely that the enemy was driven back, and when the generals talked of who had won the battle, every one of them named Ondal. At last the king said, “This is truly my son-in-law.” He welcomed Ondal into the royal family and gave him high rank.

The coffin that would not move

Years later, when King Yeongyang came to the throne, Ondal asked to lead an army south. The kingdom of Silla had taken the lands along the Han River, and Ondal swore an oath before he left: “If I do not win back the land west of the mountain passes, I will not come home.”

He fought below the walls of Adan fortress, and there he was struck by an arrow and killed.

His soldiers fought on without him, but their hearts had gone out of them. They knew what he had sworn, and they knew that Ondal was a man who kept his word.

His soldiers wanted to carry him home, but when they lifted his coffin it would not move. They pushed and heaved, and still it stayed fixed to the ground as if it had grown roots. Then the princess came. She knelt beside the coffin and laid her hand on it.

“Life and death are settled now,” she said softly. “Come, let us go home.”

And the coffin lifted, light as anything, and they carried Ondal home to be buried.

Was Ondal really a fool?

Historians think probably not. A beggar could hardly have married a princess, even a disowned one. The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture suggests Ondal was more likely a gifted soldier from a minor noble family, and that the proud old families of Goguryeo, jealous of his royal marriage, mocked him as a nobody. Their joke stuck so well that it became the story everyone remembers, and today “Foolish Ondal” is the hero of picture books, plays and a famous novel.

Talk about it

Was the princess right to defy her father? Who is the real hero of this story, Ondal or the princess? Why do you think the coffin would only move for her?

Words to know

Babo (바보) means a fool. Gongju (공주) means princess. Goguryeo (고구려) was one of Korea’s Three Kingdoms, in the north of the peninsula. The Samguk sagi (삼국사기) is the oldest surviving history of Korea.