Old Timber Top

The fairies of Kang Wen, as Griffis calls the Korean province in this tale, were having a merry time when one of them told how they had played a trick on an ox driver they called Old Timber Top. This story tells how he got that strange name.

He was a rich and stingy fellow who had made a fortune in lumber. He bought up every tree he could, had them cut down and sawed into logs and boards, and his men hauled them to his lumber yard in rough carts pulled by sturdy bulls. In winter they used sleds, but whether it was the season of snow and ice or of blossoms and flowers, the animal that pulled them was always a bull.

In Griffis’s story, sturdy bulls pull the lumber carts while smaller horses and donkeys carry loads on their backs. The narrator pictures the patient carriers almost hidden beneath brushwood and logs. He also imagines young calves living indoors as children’s pets. These scenes belong to his literary portrayal, not a rule about every Korean household or the abilities of its animals.

Old Timber Top sold his logs and boards at such high prices that the poor suffered, for they were cold and could not afford so many strings of coins for fuel. People said the old man would skin a mosquito for its hide and fat, and sometimes they called him Skin-flay. Few villagers could afford planks thick and strong enough to protect their pigs from the tigers that came down from the mountains to prowl through the villages at night. Those striped beasts grew so fond of pork that even in the snow, unafraid of the cold or the hunters’ guns, they would claw open the tops of the pens and carry off a piglet or enough of a big hog to feed their cubs for a week. Stables and cow sheds had to be built very strong, too, for a tiger who had gone hungry long enough seemed ready to eat a horse, harness and all.

Old Timber Top was not content to make money from his lumber yard alone. In the villages described in the tale, families have planted cherished trees around their ancestors’ graves. Whenever this skinflint heard of a family so poor that they had to sell the splendid trees planted around their ancestors’ graves, he sent his agents to buy the timber. They loaded a horse with long strings of copper and iron coins, which had square holes in the middle and were threaded on twisted straw, and it took a heavy horse load to carry twenty dollars’ worth. When they arrived, they beat the owner down to the lowest possible price, then chopped down and sawed up the grand trees, leaving only sawdust on the graves while the family wept to lose what they loved.

So the countryside was spoiled, and many villagers were furious with him, because they valued the trees and the landscape that his workers were stripping. But what did Old Timber Top care, as long as he could pile up his strings of coins and jingle his silver? In time, the hard old man could think of nothing but how to grow richer from other people’s needs and sufferings. The richer he got, the more he wanted, yet he grew no happier. Nobody loved him, and many hated him.

At last he decided to make a trip to Seoul, the great capital he longed to see. He expected to be given rank and an official post there, for he had a relative high in the king’s service who, he thought, would help him because they were relatives.

As an official he could wear a gorgeous shining hat with wide flaps like wings and a long white silk coat with a large square of velvet or satin on the chest, embroidered with storks or dragons, clouds and waves. He could strut through the streets like the lord of the universe in a hat so tall, with a brim so round and wide, that he would not dare go out in a high wind for fear of being blown away like a ship in a storm. Servants and common people would bow down to him, thinking he was a great man.

But how could he win such a position? He was no scholar of books or law, and no doctor. He was no soldier either and knew nothing of war. He could not ride on a general’s one-wheeled chair, pushed and pulled by four men, wearing a long red coat studded with shining metal and a brass helmet topped by a little dragon, and he feared that even if he were appointed, he would fall off and show everyone what a fool he was. All the same, he was so vain and conceited that he decided to seek advancement through his relative. He set off for Seoul, leaving his family behind to live on the cheapest kimchi, turnips and millet.

The relative’s grand house already supported a crowd of dependants and hopeful visitors. When Old Timber Top arrived in Seoul, he settled into one part of it. There he lived for a long time and was treated decently, for he was always saying sweet things and making flattering speeches to his host, and he bowed down like a servant before his grand patron. Yet even the servants and workmen despised his behaviour.

So as not to wear out his welcome, he had to give his patron a handsome present every so often. Bit by bit this ate up his income and his fortune, and while they shrank, his family at home suffered. In time a letter came saying that his business had dried up and soon no more money could be sent. While he lingered on, the news from home grew worse and worse. His wife had to sell their house to pay the debts, and then she and their daughter were living in a wretched shack at the end of the village and were no longer received by respectable people.

All this time, people in Seoul who knew that the foolish fellow still longed to wear a scholar’s fine white clothes or a soldier’s bright colors said that he had no brains. They joked about a pumpkin perched on his shoulders and laughed that the wood he had sold for so long had gone to his head. In the wine shops they argued about whether, if his skull were opened, they would find pumpkin seeds or timber inside. So they too called him Old Timber Top, mocking him as a man with a wooden head.

When the fairies heard all this, they agreed with one voice to reform the old fellow, even if they had to turn him into an ox to do it.

Old Timber Top, poor and bankrupt now, knew he must leave Seoul, go home and work for a living. When he paid his last call on his rich relative and said he was very sorry but he must go back to his village, he got a cold reception. Too poor to bring a present for the man who had fed him so long, he was told coldly to go and do as he pleased. And this after years of flattery and gift-giving! Not one word of thanks! Old Timber Top was downcast, and his heart felt cold. He knocked on his head with his fists to find out whether it really had turned to wood.

On his way home, a great storm blew up, and when he reached a village inn, cold, wet and hungry, he begged for a bed for the night. The innkeeper was the wife of a butcher who was away from home. This was a terrible blow to Old Timber Top’s pride, for he looked down on butchers and their families. Griffis presents them as people excluded from the privileges he wanted for himself.

But the woman was kind to the traveler. She gave him a hot supper and let him sleep in the room with the best stone floor, warmed by the flues from the kitchen fire. He warmed himself and dried his soaking clothes, and he was so tired that he slept on until nearly noon the next day. He was so comfortable that he felt like a great man in the capital, being treated so well.

Waking from one of his naps, he heard what he took to be the big butcher, home at last, asking his wife gruffly, “Where’s that ox? I must sell him this morning, for it’s market day.”

A minute later the man and his wife came into the room carrying four sticks the fairies had left there, a halter, a rope of twisted rice straw and a thick iron ring of the kind put through bulls’ noses to make them obey. They threw the ring and rope on the floor and quickly pushed the sticks under Old Timber Top’s back. At once he felt horns sprouting from his head and his lips swelling as thick as sausages. His mouth grew as wide as a saucer, with big teeth in the upper jaw, a tail sprang out at his other end and the four sticks turned into four legs.

Before he could make sense of what was happening, Old Timber Top was standing on four legs and the butcher was slipping the ring through his nose. Oh, how it hurt! It was an awkward business getting the animal out through the narrow door, and the paper walls and the furniture suffered, but once outside, the bull that had been Old Timber Top walked quietly to market. Whenever he tried to pull away, stop, run off or misbehave in any way, his nose hurt so terribly that he soon gave up. The butcher only had to give the rope a little jerk to make him walk as meekly as a lamb, though he was big enough to toss the man on his horns or trample him if he ever lost his temper.

You might think Timber Top would make a fighting bull, but no! In the marketplace he stood patiently for hours, hardly stamping even when the flies bit him. “If only I had worked as hard at my honest trade in my own village as that fly works at biting me!” thought the bull, who still had a man’s memory.

At last a drover came along with money to spend. He unloaded his pony and paid out many strings of coins, about twenty pounds of copper and iron. The butcher handed him the halter, and the drover led Timber Top away to sell to a butcher in his own northern town, who meant to fatten the bull and then turn him into steaks and stew meat.

On the way, though, the drover decided that such a good bargain called for a drink. He tied Timber Top by the nose rope to the low wall around a turnip field and went into a wine shop. As the wine went in, his wits went out. He fell asleep and stayed in the shop a long while, just as the old song says: first the man takes a drink, then the drink takes another drink, then the drink takes the man.

Meanwhile Timber Top looked over the low wall and, giving in to temptation, pulled up some of the plants with his teeth, chewing the green leaves first and then crunching up the turnips and swallowing them.

Presto! His horns shrank and vanished, the ring dropped out of his nose and clattered onto the stones of the path, his forelegs turned into arms, his hairy hoofed legs became human legs and Old Timber Top was a man and himself once more. To make sure, he felt himself all over, pulled his own nose, felt behind him for a tail and rubbed his head for horns. None! He looked down and saw only two legs, and he swung his arms with joy at being a man.

“Well named, turnip!” he thought. “You green plant with your mustardy taste, you’ve turned me right side up. Or have the fairies been busy?”

He had hardly got it through his half-wooden head that he was on two legs and could think like a man when he set off for home. Just then the drover rushed out of the wine shop and asked him, “Have you seen a stray bull anywhere around here?”

Speaking in fine language like a nobleman, Timber Top said there was no bull in the neighborhood that he could see or knew of, and he had heard none bellowing. Then he gave the drover a scornful look for being so stupid as to ask a gentleman such a silly question. But once he was out of sight, he slapped his thighs, pleased with his own cleverness, and walked on happily, repeating to himself, “Sticks and turnips, turnips and sticks.”

Then a big idea struck him, like a blow on one of the wooden drums in the Buddhist temples. It hit his brain so hard and swelled his head so much that his big Korean hat nearly toppled off. He acted on it at once. He hurried to the inn, slipped into the room where he had been turned into a bull, stole the butcher’s four fairy sticks from the corner and set off straight for the capital.

In Seoul he went to the house of his rich relative, where he had waited ten years for a fortune and favor that never came. He crept into his host’s bedroom and tapped the great lord of the house lightly with the fairy sticks. At once horns sprouted on top of the man’s head and a thick-lipped muzzle grew in front, his hands turned into front hoofs and his legs into a bull’s hindquarters. Yet he was not entirely an ox, but half animal and half man. Old Timber Top stopped tapping and slipped away to wait, leaving the creature half man and half ox. He knew he would soon be sent for.

When the wife, the many sons and daughters, the servants, retainers and hangers-on saw their master half man and half ox, with horns and hoofs, they were frantic. Each had his own idea of how to turn him back into a man, and they all ran through the town and the nearby villages to fetch the mudangs, the people, mostly women, whose business was driving out imps and bad fairies like the ones who had done this mischief. The kitchen maids insisted that a tokgabi goblin had done it; the men thought the mountain gods were punishing their master for his sins; and the mudang said she would find out and get him back into his own skin, if they paid her enough.

Several mudangs were called in, and knowing they would all be well paid, they kept up such a racket of drums, dancing, songs, screams and yells that the family was nearly deafened. Meanwhile the doctors kept on with their horrible medicines, rubbing, pounding, blowing, sticking needles into the bull and burning little balls of mugwort on its hide. But not one hoof or horn, not even a single hair, changed.

The mudangs declared that imps had got inside the man and must be got out. One of them brought a big bottle to trap the imps and cork them in. Another said they would have to snip the skin with scissors in about a hundred places to make little holes to let the evil creatures out, and then bottle them up so they would not escape and overrun the house and the whole town. There seemed less chance of a cure than of finding one particular hair among nine oxen, but the wife begged them not to use the scissors until everything else had failed. She did not want her dear husband’s skin turned into a sieve if it could be helped.

Just then, when the din and despair were at their worst, Old Timber Top appeared. Some of the family had collapsed on the floor, and all were too tired to ask questions, so they made way for him at once. He looked at the patient with a face as wise as an owl’s and solemnly announced that only one thing could save him: a rare and wonderful drug whose secret only he knew, but which he could fetch quickly. Of course the wife, sons and daughters promised to give everything they had to see their husband and father himself once more.

While Timber Top went out for the famous medicine, they all fell asleep, worn out, while the ox-man lay on his side, resting his horns and hoofs on the heated floor, as the people of this household did. As for Old Timber Top, the moment he was out in the street he began saying to himself over and over, “Turnips and sticks, sticks and turnips.”

At a vegetable shop he bought a fine big Korean turnip-radish, silvery white and about four feet long. He peeled it, sliced it and pounded it into a fine sauce. Then he marched into the house in triumph, woke the doctors, roused the servants and announced that his powerful drug would soon cure their master. He told them all to watch.

Pulling and hauling together, five or six men managed to get the man-bull up on his two hoofs and two feet, and Timber Top put a spoonful of the sauce on the big tongue. At once a marvelous change took place! The horns shrank until they disappeared, the lips grew thin and the mouth grew small. Hoofs, hair and hide melted into thin air, and in the wag of a dog’s tail the mighty master of the house was himself again.

All the doctors, conjurers and mudangs packed up their imp bottles and medicines and slunk away with their drums, flutes, bags and boxes, while the family heaped thanks and compliments on Old Timber Top.

The master declared him the greatest physician the world had ever known. He invited Timber Top to make the house his home for good and showered him with gifts, plenty to eat and clothes starched as white as snow. The hats he gave him were so wide that, covered with oiled paper, they made fine umbrellas in the rain, but Timber Top never went out when the wind blew, for fear of being whirled down the street, and he worried that there might still be so much wood in his head that it would spin round like a top if he was not careful.

Old Timber Top opened a medical office, treated the nobility and became physician to the king. When he called at the palace, he used a red visiting card a foot long. He wore a square of embroidered velvet on his chest and a string of amber beads as big as walnuts over his ears, and he soon grew fat, with a double chin and plump fingers that showed how prosperous he was. He lived to a ripe old age, his family lived in comfort, his sons and daughters married well and he lived to see seventeen grandchildren.

Yet all along, the fairies said it was their doing. They had made the sticks work one way and the turnips the other, and, so the storyteller says, they continued playing tricks on people as foolish as Timber Top.

About this tale

“Old Timber Top” comes from William Elliot Griffis’s Korean Fairy Tales, which was published in 1922. Its central reversal turns a timber merchant into a bull and then lets him use the same magic for his own advantage.

Griffis surrounds the magic with his own portrayal of Korean transport, money, social rank, ritual specialists and medicine. His sweeping generalisations and comic caricatures should not be read as a complete or current account of Korean life. The story is not a simple tale of greed punished: Timber Top ends rich and honoured without confessing his deception.

Read the original: Korean Fairy Tales (Project Gutenberg)

Suggested for ages 9–12 with guidance for painful restraint, threatened slaughter, proposed cutting of skin and a deceptive cure.

Has Timber Top actually changed?

As a bull, Timber Top experiences pain, confinement and the prospect of being sold for slaughter. That experience could lead him to treat others differently. Instead, he uses what he has learned to create another victim and then sells the cure. The same desire for status that ruined his timber business now brings him a medical reputation.

The fairies claim credit for reforming him, while the events invite doubt. His family gains comfort, but the villagers whose trees he bought cheaply receive no repair. His success depends on knowledge of the particular enchantment he inflicted, not medical training. The turnip works within that magic; it is not evidence of a real treatment.

Compare the two businesses

For the timber yard and the invented cure, identify the need Timber Top exploits, what he controls and who pays. Then find evidence for and against the fairies’ claim that their trick improved him. Does wealth at the end prove that he has become generous?

Talk about it

• Why did people call him Old Timber Top?
• How did Timber Top discover the secret of the sticks and the turnips?
• Do you think Timber Top deserved his happy ending? Why or why not?

You may also like

• The Great Stone Fire Eater — another Griffis tale of old Seoul
• The Old Woman Who Became a Goblin — another Korean tale of a strange transformation