Son Tinh

Legend has it

Within a single tale the book sets out three different origins for the mountain god, drawn from three sources, and makes no attempt to reconcile them. The first, from the notes of a Tang dynasty monk: the great king of Mount Tan Vien is a mountain spirit of the Nguyen family, very responsive, answering the people's prayers in drought or flood. The second, from another book of records: a mountain spirit of the Nguyen family who once swore an oath with the water creatures and lived on Mount Gia Ninh in Phong Chau — the version that leads into the contest for the bride. The third turns it around: one of the fifty sons who went down to the sea with Lac Long Quan. The book sets all three side by side and leaves the reader to judge.¹

The bride price everyone knows — an elephant with nine tusks, a cockerel with nine spurs, a horse with nine red manes — is not in the old text. What it records is that the next day Son Tinh brought and offered precious jade, gold and silver, mountain birds and forest beasts, and the king consented. The three nines were added by a later age, and added very well: they turn a race to deliver gifts into a riddle all but impossible to solve, and give the mountain god's victory the taste of destiny. Nor was he the first suitor — Thuc Vuong Phan had come to ask for her hand before him, and the king refused, wanting a worthier son-in-law.¹

The battle is described in some detail, and described as a war the people joined. Thuy Tinh raised the waters; Son Tinh stretched a fishing net across the river; his opponent then opened another branch of the river to come round behind the mountain, and opened a further branch to attack the front. The people at the foot of the mountain wove bamboo screens for cover, beat drums and shouted to lend their strength, and when they saw scum and twigs drifting outside the screens they loosed arrows; those struck died and floated up as the corpses of dragons, snakes, fish and soft-shelled turtles, filling the river. The fighting never ends: the book records that every year around the seventh and eighth months the waters still rise.¹

The old chronicles say

The tale also keeps a passage belonging to quite another age, when the country had been lost to the north. While Gao Pian governed An Nam he set out to subdue by magic the places that held sacred power, by a thoroughly cruel art: take the body of an unmarried girl, dress it as though she were alive, lay out an offering, watch for the moment it stirs and strike with a sword, the point being to lure the god into the body and kill it. When he tried it on the great king of Mount Tan Vien, Gao Pian saw only the god riding a white horse on the clouds, who spat and went away; and he sighed that the sacred power of the South cannot yet be measured.¹