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@mgtask Like the others said, it goes back ultimately to Tolkien.

But it isn’t just because everyone picked up LotR at a young age and fell in love with it.

LotR has its roots most strongly in oral mythological and folklore traditions, between Beowulf, Norse mythology, and German and European fairy tales. He wanted to create a mythology for the British people which he felt was lacking in the modern day, so Middle Earth is based loosely off a romantic, pastoral, reactionary ideal of epic Britishness. That isn’t a tradition most fantasy writers adopted.

The fantasy spaces as we know them today boomed to life between the 60s and the 80s. From LotR came not only many close imitations such as Terry Brooks’ Shannara series, but most importantly to the modern day, the game Dungeons &Dragons, which was more or less an amalgamation of mostly Tolkien with strong influence from the early sword and sorcery genre, used as a fan-made expansion to the wargame Chainmail.

From D&D came not only many fantasy novels, but also the roguelike and CRPG video game genres in the west, as well as the JRPG genre in Japan with Dragon Quest and, later, Final Fantasy. The CRPG genre evolved into the modern Western RPG with some of the most well-known video game titles of all time, such as the Elder Scrolls and Witcher series. All of these are super mainstream in the present day, and many people of the last couple generations were introduced to fantasy through them rather than through LotR.

To double down on that further, in the 80s, Dungeons & Dragons and many facets of fantasy were persecuted by American Christianity in the Satanic Panic. I know people for whom even Lord of the Rings was considered a Satanic work in their households! An entire generation of kids grew a strong attachment to a genre that was not only escapist fantasy, but something their parents hated, giving them an even stronger bond with it. Today, that generation has grown up, has had kids, has inherited the entertainment industries. For decades, kids have grown up in families very fond of fantasy even if they dropped out of being particularly nerdy or literary people in general.

The Peter Jackson LotR movies, being fantastic movies with absurd production value even divorced from their genre, made fantasy in general and LotR in particular a household name to an even greater extent than when LotR was still being published. Even people who don’t read at all in the US can probably tell you what a hobbit is. We even have an LotR Amazon Original series and online game coming out in the next few years, for crying out loud, and the Shadow of Mordor games sold pretty well during their releases only a few years ago.

Since the 60s, fantasy has been a familiar escapist comfort for the average nerd, not so much because of the continuing amazing epic quality of the actual LotR books, but because of the endless derivation from and adaptation of LotR.

To muddy things further, there is a second “main branch” of fantasy besides the very sterile sort Christians and homeschools tend to consume. I’ve talked to so many Christian fantasy fans who’ve only really read Lewis, Paolini, Sanderson, Tolkien, and various middle grade authors, unaware of the gigantic influence Burroughs, Cook, Howard, Le Guin, Leiber, Lovecraft, Moorcock,  Smith, Zelazny had on the genre over the decades.

Not to mention Chesterton, Dunsany, Eddison, and Vance, even if they’ve actually read Chesterton. This is the branch most people actually write in these days, unless they’re deliberately aping the pseudo-King-James niceness of LotR in an attempt to get back to the good old days, unaware that Dunsany probably did it better anyway.

I think I kind of missed the point of the original question. Maybe I subconsciously read into it an assumption that everyone’s been drawing from a pretty narrow source endlessly for decades, and a question as to why people put up with it. In which case my answer is “Not only was LotR itself loved so much it became a common language for fans of the genre from way back then all the way to today, but the genre is a diverse and eclectic environment and isn’t quite as inbred as it might look on the surface.”

Because I conflated “medieval setting” with “fantasy in general,” which, yeah, I think completely missed the point XD

I think the important thing to look at is “bygone age,” or some approximation of it, rather than medieval. It’s as often a pseudo-bronze-age, near-industrial, or post-post-apocalypse as it is “generic feudalism,” unless you look specifically at Tolkien clones.

I do think @Eitan had it right when he said something overused definitely works. At least, it can be the familiar element readers expect you to combine with something new.

But there’s also a huge space for atypical settings in fantasy right now, especially in non-European cultures. African and East Asian fantasy in particular have been on the rise for at least a few years now.

Please forgive the lack of structure to this post. I’ve got a wicked headache but unwisely decided to weigh in while I had a bit of free time.