Seolmundae Halmang is a creator goddess of Jeju Island’s mythology, greatly honored in Jeju shamanism, and many tales credit her with shaping the island’s terrain. She was so vast that when she lay with Hallasan for a pillow, her toes reached an island across the sea. Gathering dirt in her skirt and pouring it into the water, she raised the some three hundred sixty oreum — small volcanoes — and the last peak she piled, Hallasan, holds the Baengnokdam crater at its top.
Yet this goddess also carries human attributes, death among them. Several legends have her die — sunk in a Hallasan swamp, or drowned in the pot of porridge she was boiling for her five hundred sons, who then became the five hundred rocks. That fusion — a primordial giant whose body becomes the land, and who nonetheless dies an ordinary death — connects to our world, which holds mythic scale and human frailty in one place.