Place
Mount Tan Vien
The three-peaked mountain west of Thang Long whose deity was held the foremost protective god of the country, and the setting of the Son Tinh story.
At a glance
- Location
- The old text gives no administrative place name for the mountain; the version that leads into the contest for the bride has its great king, a mountain spirit of the Nguyen family, living on Mount Gia Ninh in the land of Phong Chau1
- Type
- A sacred mountain with people living at its foot and a river running about it: in drought or flood the people pray there and are answered, and Thuy Tinh opened branches of the river to come round behind it1
About the place
Legend has it
The mountain enters the folk collection with a god who has three biographies, drawn from three different sources and never reconciled. The notes of a Tang dynasty monk say the great king of Mount Tan Vien is a mountain spirit of the Nguyen family, very responsive, so that in drought or flood the people pray to him and are answered. Another book of records has him swearing an oath with the water creatures and living on Mount Gia Ninh in the land of Phong Chau. A third collection says instead that he was one of the fifty sons who went down to the sea with Lac Long Quan, not a mountain spirit born of the sacred air.1
The battle between the two gods takes the mountain itself for its terrain. Thuy Tinh raised the waters, Son Tinh stretched a fishing net across the river; his opponent opened another branch of the river to come round behind the mountain, then a further branch to attack the front. The people at the foot of the mountain wove bamboo screens for cover, beat drums and shouted, and loosed arrows when they saw scum and twigs drifting outside the screens. Immediately afterwards the book states why the story is told: every year around the seventh and eighth months the waters rise, the people near the foot of the mountain suffer high winds and flooding and their rice is ruined, and it has been handed down that this is the two gods contending to marry My Nuong.1
The old chronicles say
The mountain appears again in a passage from the centuries of northern rule, showing that the legend went on living after the country was lost. Gao Pian, governing An Nam, set out to subdue by magic the places that held sacred power, by a 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, the point being to lure the god into the body and kill it — and he used it on many gods. Here it failed: he saw only the god riding a white horse on the clouds, who spat and went away, and he sighed that such a rising force in the South could never be cut off.1
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