Literature: Experts fear BookTok fantasy threatens Welsh culture

“It was something that, at first, would always really excite me, but has become increasingly something of a pet peeve,” said bookseller and fantasy blogger Bethan Hindmarch, from Kidwelly, Carmarthenshire.

“Tolkien was the one who opened that floodgate [and] Terry Pratchett always did it in a great way. His own daughter has a Welsh name, and it was about honouring [the language] and being respectful.

“But you do get authors who want their fantasy to sound more mystical, magical and made up.”

Prof Dimitra Fimi, a lecturer in fantasy and children’s literature at Glasgow University, and lived and taught in Cardiff for more than 20 years, said the genre was “particularly good at connecting us with the past in imaginative ways”.

“Fantasy has – definitely in the last couple of centuries – been consciously playing with myths, legends, folk tales… Wales in particular has a very rich tradition in terms of that and there is a chain of key fantasy authors that have played around with that material.”

She said, for Tolkien, Welsh language was the main influence, particularly in his more popular works.

“If you think of Sindarin – one of the two main Elvish languages – it’s very much based on the phonology and grammar, at points, of Welsh,” she said.

“I think what happened is you get a generation of writers after Tolkien who want to write fantasy, [but] they don’t want to replicate what Tolkien has done.”