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Hi @mgtask !

I agree with @katja-r that Tolkien had a huge influence on fantasy, but Middle Earth isn’t that much medieval – it’s a combination of 19th century pastoral England, Northern mythology, ancient Europe, and Tolkien’s imagination. In fact, Narnia is much more medieval – knights, ladies, castles, hunting the white deer, feudalism, witches and evil Saracens 😉  (I have nothing against any nation or race, please don’t get me wrong!)

I guess that fantasy is associated with the medieval because of the romantic era – the young national movements needed an epic national history. People started to return to the old stories and fairy-tales, and artists portrayed the past as magical, heroic and mysterious. Later in history, some lazy fantasy writers combined the generic fantasy races of Tolkien with the Romantic medieval, and created the mutation called ”Generic fantasy”.

That’s my opinion, based on a general knowledge about the subject, I’m always open to change my mind if you’ll show me I’m wrong.

Now, I think that a golden rule when dealing with cliches is:

If it’s overused, it works.

People love Generic fantasy, that’s why it’s so common – you just need to write it well. Be creative! 😀

It reminds me of an excellent article I read in KingdomPen about the damsel in distress trope. I don’t remember the name, but search it in their site and you’ll find 🙂