한국국제교류재단

Seok makes hand plows of various sizes and shapes, often tailoring his products to customers’ preferences.

“In many foreign countries where gardening is a popular pastime, I heard they have hand tools like trowels and rakes, but nothing like this one with an angled blade,” he said. “It seems the homi’s curved handle puts less strain on the wrist and lumps of clay don’t stick to the blade as with a trowel.”

The story of the indigenous Korean tool being widely used overseas is more than just a pleasant surprise — at least to the generations of Koreans who remember their mothers wielding it to work the fields. Homi used to be a necessity on every farm for particular farming chores that were mostly carried out by women. Mothers would go out to the fields early in the morning and work all day until dusk. Using the small but versatile tool, they would turn up the earth to plant the seeds for the year’s crops, remove the weeds that would hamper their growth, dig out the crops with its pointed tip, and make furrows or level them down with its rounded edge.

It is impossible to keep the chest and back upright while using the homi. Facing the earth with the tool in hand means turning toward the land with the body lax and stooped. The hunched backs of the mothers working in the fields resemble the homi’s curved blade. There is something rueful about the roundness, like the bent back of a person who tries to straighten up but cannot. Just looking at the round backs toiling to prepare the land to grow life arouses certain emotions.

Therefore, meeting the blacksmith who has spent 52 years crafting countless homi enkindled a series of questions. What does he see in his work? What is he thinking when he hammers a hot piece of metal into shape? What does he make of his job, which requires him to commune with water, fire, air and metal to produce a single hand plow?

“With a blade like this, it looks like the dirt will be heaped rather than parted. Could you make it flatter here? And the tip sharper?” asked a customer while examining a homi that he had picked up from the shelves. He wanted the convex edge of the triangular blade flattened and the tip sharpened. Seemingly used to dealing with such requests, Seok took the tool from the customer and went up to the furnace. He lit a fire, giving it a blow with the bellows. As the flames started to rise, he looked at them for a while before putting the tool into the furnace.

“Everyone has their own way of working with the tool. Though they may be using the same homi, the way the dirt is plowed is different. That is why some of my customers have a new homi tailored to their preferences as soon as they buy it,” he explained, proudly adding, “This place is different from a hardware shop carrying only readymade goods.”

Gazing at the fire, the look in his eyes changed in an instant before he picked up a pair of tongs and took out the heated tool. A blazing fire seemed to be trapped in the red hot metal. He placed the metal on the anvil and started to pound it with a hammer, turning it this way and that. The clang of metal striking metal resounded through the smithy and sparks flew in all directions. As the red glow faded, the blade was gradually reshaped, and the customer nodded with approval.

Watching the flames swallowing a piece of metal seemed to induce a trance-like absorption. Now, Seok put a piece of iron as large as a man’s fist in the furnace and stared again at the flames. Iron melts at around 1,500°C, and the blacksmith must seize the moment when metal becomes malleable just before it melts. The sole means of reading the temperature inside Seok’s old furnace, which lacks a thermometer, is his intuition.

“I observe the color of the metal to read its state. If it’s still red, it has to be heated longer. Being reddish like the moon means it’s too hard, so you need to wait until it gets as white as the sun. Beyond that point, however, the metal melts and you can’t make anything with it,” he said.

His perception of the moon as reddish and the sun as white had not quite registered with me when the pounding began again. This time, it was not a regular hammer but an automatic forging hammer that moved up and down at a regular pace. Seok placed a piece of heated metal under it to be shaped. The machine’s rhythmic pounding and the swift movement of his hands turning it over repeatedly to obtain the desired shape were in wonderful harmony. Under the rhythm, the triangular blade was d, and the bit of metal stretched out like taffy formed the shank to connect the blade to the handle. After the roughly shaped metal was heated up again and the shape refined, the blade was finished.

“At a foundry, things are made by pouring molten metal into molds, but it’s completely different at a smithy, where metal is heated, pounded, stretched and shaped by hand,” Seok said.Pounding involves a series of interrelated procedures — controlling the fire to reshape the metal, dealing with the air, and transforming the innate quality of the metal.

“The air blown by the bellows s tiny holes in the melting metal. Pounding helps to fill the holes andan even density across the surface. That’s why blacksmiths of the past used to strike the raw metal hundreds and thousands of times. But I haven’t done a lot of that because I adopted a machine hammer early on,” Seok said.

An insight into the metal is a prerequisite for this work. No matter how experienced a blacksmith might be, he can never discern its quality just by looking at it.

“You can’t say precisely how strong any given piece of metal is until you heat and strike it. Similar as they may seem, all metals have different properties, just as rice comes in many varieties. Some are strong but break easily, but others are both strong and resistant to breakage, which makes them good for sickles or spades,” Seok said.

To make his homi, Seok uses leaf springs recycled from vehicles. “My favorite material is steel, which other blacksmiths seldom use,” he said. “Steel is so hard and dense that it is more difficult to handle than iron. But tools made of soft metal tend to be curled up at the edges rather than being sharp. You lose customer trust if you sell such products. Repair them? It was possible in the past, when homi were heavier and thicker. A typical homi used to weigh about 500 grams, which meant there was plenty of material to stretch the edges out for a sharper blade. Or else, we could attach scrap metal to the edges and sharpen them. But nowadays, people prefer lighter tools weighing about 200 to 300 grams, which are too thin to repair.”

Seok believes that the value of metal tools is determined by tempering, a heat treatment method performed by briefly dipping the heated metal into cold water. Although the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard described tempering as the process of “enclosing fire in the iron with cold water to enclose the wild beast of fire in the steel prison,” Seok maintained that it was a skill beyond description. Depending on the nature of the metal, its thickness, temperature and other conditions, tempering can take less than a second or much longer. Called the “crowning glory of blacksmithing,” it is a critical process that determines the durability of the metal. So much so that in the past, blacksmiths would complete the process in the quiet solitude of night. Indeed, it could not have been easy to negotiate the two extremes of water and fire to get the best out of the material.

Seok shows how to use the tongs to put the blades in and out of the furnace and the hammer to strike the heated metal on the anvil.

The blacksmith says the hardest part of his career has been enduring the hard work day in and day out; his crooked fingers attest to his tough life.