Reading Tolkien in Chinese

Reading Chinese translations of Tolkien's Middle-earth texts, this book explores how Chinese-to-English translations enrich understandings of the original works, and what the exercise reveals about the broader implications for fantasy, religious and translation studies.

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.