Dokkaebi

Korean folk figures known for mischief, first recorded in a Silla-era tale. Folklorist Kim Jong-dae says the horned, club-carrying dokkaebi of modern pictures comes from textbooks printed under Japanese colonial rule.

English Wikipedia traces the earliest written dokkaebi to a Silla-era tale, Lady Dohwa and Bachelor Bihyeong, in the Memorabilia of the Three Kingdoms, which was compiled under Goryeo. Many anthologies of folk tales from the Joseon period include them.

Two English-language books described them in 1898 and 1922. Isabella Bird wrote in Korea and Her Neighbours (1898) that the tok-gabi were the most feared and the best known of Korea's demons. She judged them to be myths of the will-o'-the-wisp kind, raised in Korea to true devils with fetishes of their own. She recorded the belief that they started as the souls of people who met sudden or violent deaths, and that they arose on battlefields, at execution grounds and wherever many people died. William Elliot Griffis, in Korean Fairy Tales (1922), called the tokgabi the naughtiest sprite in Korean fairy lore, one that dislikes sunshine and the outdoors and that nobody has seen in the street.

The familiar image of a dokkaebi, with horns, a caveman's clothes and a spiked iron club, is borrowed. Folklorist Kim Jong-dae told CBS NoCut News that this figure copies the Japanese oni. Under Japanese rule, school textbooks printed the Japanese tale of the old man with a lump, and the tale's oni illustrations were printed with it. The oni picture then passed for a dokkaebi.