Korean Fox-Woman Tales in James Scarth Gale’s Korean Folk Tales

Record summary

James Scarth Gale’s Korean Folk Tales is an early twentieth-century English-language collection containing Korean narratives about spirits, animals, and extraordinary transformations. Its fox-woman material is relevant to the kumiho tradition, in which a fox may assume human form and interact dangerously or ambiguously with people. The collection is valuable for tracing colonial-era translation and circulation, but it does not provide a neutral transcript of Korean oral tradition. Researchers should compare Gale’s rendering with Korean-language versions and later scholarship on the changing image of the kumiho.