Reading Tolkien in Chinese: Religion, Fantasy and Translation

Approaching translations of Tolkien’s works as stories in their own right, this book reads multiple Chinese translations of Tolkien’s writing to uncover the new and unique perspectives that enrich the meaning of the original texts.

Exploring translations of The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, The Silmarillion, The Children of Hurin and The Unfinished Tales, Eric Reinders reveals the mechanics of meaning by literally back-translating the Chinese into English to dig into the conceptual common grounds shared by religion, fantasy and translation, namely the suspension of disbelief, and questions of truth - literal, allegorical and existential. With coverage of themes such as gods and heathens, elves and ’Men’, race, mortality and immortality, fate and doom, and language, Reinder’s journey to Chinese Middle-earth and back again drastically alters views on Tolkien’s work where even basic genre classification surrounding fantasy literature look different through the lens of Chinese literary expectations.

Invoking scholarship in Tolkien studies, fantasy theory and religious and translations studies, this is an ambitious exercises in comparative imagination across cultures that suspends the prejudiced hierarchy of originals over translations.

Eric Reinders is Associate Professor in the Department of Religion, at Emory University, USA, where he teaching courses on Chinese religion, relation and fantasy, and Tolkien. He has published on many aspects of the interactions of China and the West. He is the author of The Moral Narratives of Hayao Miyazaki (2016) and his articles have appeared in The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts.