A sourced illustration has not yet been added. This gap is included in the coverage record.

Overview

Keel Wee encounters two long-haired beings in archaic clothing playing a board game on mountain stones. When he tries to interfere, one strikes his fingers and puts a seedlike object into his mouth, leaving him unable to speak. He watches without hunger or awareness of passing days until his axe handle crumbles and his fall upsets the board. The players vanish.

He returns aged to a village transformed by five centuries, encountering telegraphs, glass windows and electric transport. When the object drops from his mouth his speech returns, but his family is long dead; he dies beside their graves and unusual mountain flowers grow there. Griffis uses the supernatural encounter to frame historical change. His demeaning comparisons of the aged man with imagined earlier inhabitants are not adopted as an ethnographic account, and the fairy players receive no invented personal names.

Altered passage of timeSilencing stoneExact literary telling
01

Origins & earliest records

Korean tale in an English literary retelling

02

Records & interpretation

Full relevant tale and collection preface directly read.

Selected bibliography

Documented works and useful reading. This is not a list of every appearance.

  1. 01

    Korean Fairy Tales

    William Elliot Griffis · 1922

    The Woodman and the Mountain Fairies, pp. 203–212

Family & connections

A source-supported family tree or inspiration record has not yet been compiled for this profile. Related reading below indicates a connection in subject matter, not a proven lineage or creative influence.

Primary records and illustrations

Direct primary record

William Elliot Griffis, Korean Fairy Tales (1922)

The Woodman and the Mountain Fairies. pp. 203–212

Entire chapter read; object first compared to seed, later called stone. No identification with another named woodcutter tradition asserted. Colonial imagery not treated as factual population history.

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References

Sources supporting this profile. Linked pages have their own scope and editorial standards.

  1. Historical tale collectionGriffis, The Woodman and the Mountain FairiesResearch access: 2026-10-05

Image credits

A sourced illustration has not yet been added. This gap is included in the coverage record.

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