<공무도하가>의 구전가요적 성격과 주제의식

Abstract

In studies of Gongmudohaga, most researchers had hitherto regarded Gogeumju(by Choi Pyo) as a main text, not Geumjo(by Chae Ong), even though Gogeumju was written later than Geumjo and the former did not record the lyrics of Gongmudohaga. I thought, this was a wrong routine and must had been corrected. Therefore, I first tried to corroborate whether the song were directly derived from the tale in Geumjo. For this first purpose, I analyzed the tale in terms of a sentence structure of the original text written in classical Chinese and a rationality of unfolding events in the tale. As a result, I ascertained that the wife of 'Gwangbu(crazy man)' was drowned earlier than him and he sang the song and drowned after seeing his wife's death with his own eyes. Based on this result, I secondly tried to demonstrate that the song Gongmudohaga was a longstanding oral ballad having been occurred from a universal human life irrelevant to the background story in the literature. This judgment led to the conclusion that the meaning of the song should be interpreted on its own, separate from the tale. In analyzing the lyrics of song, I focused on letters used in the song and the stream of poetical imagination. Especially, I translated '公(Gong)' as 'Thou(그대: a title of respect normally used)', and '墮(Ta)' as the meaning of falling into the river of death by linking it to '河(Ha: river). Gongmudohaga's subject consciousness was involved in the original mind such as the fear of death, which was an inscrutable phenomenon, and the curiosity of the posthumous world. So, I thought it must have been created before the religious beliefs of posthumous world were established. For this reason, the song could have been widely spread over a long period of time, and eventually it would have been known to China and recorded in the literature.