Two Towers, a 2002 film based on the 1954 fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings by British novelist Tolkien, escapes the crisis by covering himself and his companions with a magic cloth given to them by the Elf Fairy when they were caught in Mordor, the home of evil
But surprisingly, a similar story was already in our classical literature 200 years before The Lord of the Rings Cheon Ye-rok, a novel written by Joseon scholar Imbang 1640-1724, tells the following fantastic story
During the Manchu Invasion of Korea by the Qing Dynasty, many people fled Hanyang and fled One of them was attacked by the Qing army, which suddenly invaded The mountains and fields were filled with Qing troops, so he thought it was over and fell into despair
Meanwhile, he saw a scholar and a servant tied a horse under a pine tree and set up a tent with a wide white cloth, and watched the Qing army comfortably while relaxing in it The refugees were in a hurry, but they couldn’t understand the reason, so they approached the scholar and asked
“You can’t see the full army of Orangists. You should run away if you want to live. Why are you staying here?”
The scholar smiled and answered calmly
“You have to run away on two legs anyway, so it’s not the same to be killed or caught by an army of orangutans on horseback. If you want to live, come inside the tent.”
For a moment, the refugees thought the scholar was crazy However, when I thought about it, even if I ran away, I was caught and killed by the Qing army, so I entered the tent set up by the scholar with a faint expectation
The Qing army killed or captured people as they saw them But somehow, he didn’t touch the tent where the scholar and his group were sitting He acted as if the curtain was invisible at all
By the end of the night, everyone in the tent was safe The evacuees breathed a sigh of relief, even though they were perplexed because they could not understand why the Qing soldiers were leaving themselves and a group of scholars alone
The sun was setting and all the Qing army left for another place Despite being attacked by the Qing army all day, the scholars and refugees survived
The scholar, who got up from his seat, ordered the servant to close his tent and untie the string from which the horse was tied The refugee thought that the scholar had some divine ability to avoid the disturbance, so he asked for his name, but the scholar did not answer and rode away with the servant
The refugees, who escaped from the crisis safely, wandered around and returned to Hanyang’s house when the Manchu War ended And he met a person who was evacuated with him, was captured by the Qing army, was taken prisoner, was released, and came back, and talked about his encounter with the Qing army while evacuating in the past
At that time, the refugee recalled what had happened inside the tent that the scholar had set up and asked him why the Qing army had not seen him Then he was surprised and answered like this is what he said
“What do you mean, a white curtain spread under a pine tree I didn’t see that then Instead, there was a high and strong wall and a waterway dug around the deep moat castle, so the Qing army just passed by without daring to touch it.”
So the white cloth that the scholar unfolded was a treasure with a mysterious ability to make people see the illusion of walls and moats, not real objects
This setting is remarkably the same as the magic cloth from The Lord of the Rings People think alike regardless of the time, but should I say that Imbang was faster than Tolkien in that regard