Identity of the Vietnamese narrative culture: archetypal journeys from folk narratives to fantasy short stories

The paper investigates how archetypal journeys to other worlds in Vietnamese folk narratives were re-created and transformed in medieval fantasy short stories (truyen ky) to express socio-political and religious discourses. Following Vietnam’s independence after a millennium of Chinese domination, Confucianism became the dominant state ideology, especially from the early Le Dynasty and during Le Thanh Tong’s reign. In the 16th–17th centuries, amid civil wars, dynastic upheavals, and peasant rebellions, Confucianism proved powerless to manage turmoil, prompting Confucian scholars to assimilate folk cultural materials and Taoist thought in prose narratives. Truyen ky, derived from Chinese chuanqi, appropriated folk motifs and plots and used fantasy to convey commentary on contemporary life. Nguyen Du’s 16th-century collection Excursive Notes on Weird Stories (Truyen ky man luc), comprising 19 tales, is identified as a paradigmatic work that adapts early folk narrative collections (e.g., Viet dien u linh; Linh Nam chich quai). The study aims to uncover the cultural identity embedded in these narratives through sociohistorical analysis of journey motifs to the upper and lower worlds and to elucidate how these motifs were adapted to reflect political messages, religious conflicts, and Confucian authors’ inner dilemmas.

The study situates Vietnamese truyen ky within the broader East Asian literary tradition, noting its origin in the Chinese chuanqi genre and its reliance on folk motifs and plots (Tran, 1995; 2000; Lu, 1993). Early Vietnamese folk narrative compilations in Han characters—Viet dien u linh (Ly Te Xuyen) and Linh Nam chich quai (Tran The Phap)—serve as key sources of motifs later reworked by medieval authors, notably Nguyen Du. Le Quy Don’s Kien Van Tieu Luc attests to Nguyen Du’s reputation and stance, providing contemporaneous evaluation of his work. The paper references extensive Vietnamese scholarship on Confucianism’s literary role and medieval prose (Nguyen, 2000; Tran, 2012, 2014), Vietnamese cultural identity (Tran, 2006), Buddhism and Taoism’s influence (Nguyen, 2014, 2018; Vu, 2017), and motif theory (Thompson, 1958; Garry & Hasan, 2005). It also invokes Eastern aesthetics’ valorization of classical reference and imitation, explaining the medieval preference for reusing traditional plots and archetypes.

The research employs a sociohistorical and comparative textual analysis. Primary sources include early Vietnamese folk narrative collections written in Han characters (e.g., Viet dien u linh; Linh Nam chich quai) and the 16th-century fantasy short story collection Excursive Notes on Weird Stories by Nguyen Du. The study focuses on identifying and comparing journey motifs to the upper (heavenly) and lower (hell) worlds across folk narratives and their literary adaptations. Through close reading of representative tales (e.g., The Legend of Tu Thuc Cave; Chu Dong Tu; Tu Thu Married a Fairy; The Woodcutter of Nua Mountain; Chancellor at Tan Vien Temple; Devil General), the analysis examines motif transformation, narrative functions, religious-symbolic semantics (Taoist and Buddhist elements), and embedded socio-political commentary. Historical and cultural bibliographies are used to contextualize settings, characters, cult sites, and ritual practices associated with these narratives.

- Archetypal otherworld journeys from folk narratives (upper/heavenly and lower/hell worlds) were revived and expanded in medieval truyen ky to articulate complex socio-political and religious themes. - Journeys to the upper world, often via sacred mountains, reflect Taoist-inflected quests for utopia, escape, and wu-wei, signaling Confucian writers’ disillusionment with political realities (e.g., Tu Thu Married a Fairy’s adaptation of the Tu Thuc legend; The Woodcutter of Nua Mountain’s hermit-prophet figure and political allegory predicting the Ho dynasty’s fall). - Journeys to the lower world (hell) are more developed in medieval fantasy than in folk collections, used to stage moral adjudication, karmic justice, and ideological conflict (e.g., Chancellor at Tan Vien Temple, where Ngo Tu Van confronts a usurping ghost; Devil General, where Van Di Thanh is deified to manage the realm of spirits). - The adaptations integrate Taoist spirituality with folk beliefs (e.g., mountain cults, yin-yang markets) and Buddhist karmic frameworks, while embedding Confucian virtues and commentary, producing multi-layered narratives. - Confucian authors, positioned between official ideology and peasant-village folk culture, used truyen ky to veil political critique, express resistance to Confucian orthodoxy’s inadequacy amid turmoil, and negotiate the competition between Confucianism and Taoism. - Eastern aesthetic norms of classical reference and imitation supported deliberate re-use and transformation of folk archetypes, enabling high-art reconfiguration while preserving cultural continuity.

The findings demonstrate that the archetypal journey functions as a cultural conduit between folk belief systems and elite literary production, allowing Confucian writers to express political dissent and spiritual exploration within acceptable narrative forms. By adapting folk motifs of ascent (sacred mountains, immortals) and descent (hell courts, karmic judgment), medieval authors articulated Confucian helplessness and Taoist-leaning solutions (seclusion, wu-wei), reflecting broader religious competition and acculturation. The robust development of hell-journey narratives underscores their utility for dramatizing ideological conflicts and moral order amid historical chaos. This synthesis reveals the identity of Vietnamese narrative culture as one that harmonizes folklore, Taoist metaphysics, Buddhist ethics, and Confucian moral-political concerns, using archetypes to encode context-specific messages about authority, virtue, and cosmic order.

Through archetypal journeys, the fantasy short stories of medieval Vietnam contributed to the successful construction of the metaphysical world at deeper levels in the literature and represented a breakthrough in the process of artistic transformation from the acquisition of religious ideas and the exploitation of the materials of folk narratives. The process of reconfiguring archetypes in Vietnamese medieval literature revealed complex issues related to the historical, social, and cultural context in the 16th and 17th centuries. Vietnamese medieval literature reflects the power and influence of the competition between Taoism and Confucianism and the conflict between the official Confucian discourse of dynasty and the unofficial, resistant discourse that strongly manifest in the Vietnamese culture with the unification of spiritual power between Folklore and Taoism. As Valk (2005) argues, through the fantasy story genre, medieval Vietnamese writers demonstrated the ability to adapt folk materials to the highest artistic level, absorbing, transforming and reproducing archetypes to convey new cultural, social and historical messages. By exploring the rebirth of archetypes, writers adapted traditional folk narratives and harmonized the faiths and aspirations of their cultural background through special narrative techniques.