The Song stands as the rightful heir to Han Chinese culture. For The Condor Heroes, the physical geography of “China” is split among the retreating Song dynasty, the Jin dynasty, and the Mongol tribes. As Christopher Hamm nicely puts it in his Paper Swordsmen: Jin Yong and the Modern Chinese Martial Arts Novel, Jin Yong’s books can be read as a negotiation between China’s cultural and geographical/political manifestations. The importance of his novels, and Condor Heroes in particular, goes well beyond sales and film adaptations. I would add that, for many readers, his novels contribute to constructing broad conceptions of Chinese identity. There is probably more than a bit of truth to the old joke that most Chinese students learn history not from textbooks, but from Jin Yong novels. And yet Jin Yong is even more ubiquitous in the Chinese-speaking world than Tolkien in the English world. When people think of a fantasy setting, they usually imagine something not too far removed from Lord of the Rings or its derivations.

This book’s publisher seems to favor referring to him as the Chinese Tolkien, and perhaps that comes close to the mark. Jin Yong, the pen name of Louis Cha, is universally known in the Chinese language world, and the influence of his books is difficult to overestimate. This is a long overdue translation of a key work of martial arts fiction, a novel that has broad cultural importance in China at least partly because it has been adapted multiple times for film and television. 416pp £14.99 ISBN 9780857053008.Īnna Holmwood’s new translation of Jin Yong’s novel A Hero Born: Legends of the Condor Heroes I (射雕英雄傳) is a significant and well-crafted addition to the Chinese canon in English.

A Hero Born: Legends of the Condor Heroes I Tr.

Condor heroes