EPIC

long narrative poem recounting heroic deeds, although the term has also been loosely used to describe novels, such as Tolstoy's War and Peace, and motion pictures, such as Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible. In literary usage, the term encompasses both oral and written compositions. The prime examples of the oral epic are Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. Outstanding examples of the written epic include Virgil's Aeneid and Lucan's Pharsalia in Latin; Chanson de Roland in medieval French; Ariosto's Orlando Furioso and Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata in Italian; Poema (or Cantar) de mio Cid in Spanish; and Milton's Paradise Lost and Spenser's Faerie Queene in English. There are also seriocomic epics, such as the Morgante of a 15th-century Italian poet, Pulci, and the pseudo-Homeric Battle of the Frogs and Mice. Another distinct group is made up of the so-called beast epicsnarrative poems written in Latin in the Middle Ages and dealing with the struggle between a cunning fox and a cruel and stupid wolf. Underlying all of the written forms is some trace of an oral character, partly because of the monumental persuasiveness of Homer's example but more largely because the epic was, in fact, born of an oral tradition. It is on the oral tradition of the epic form that this article will focus. long narrative poem in an elevated style celebrating heroic achievement and treating themes of historical, national, religious, or legendary significance. It is to be distinguished from the briefer heroic lay, the less elevated, less ambitious folktale and ballad, and the more consistently extravagant and fantastic medieval romance, though in the narrative poetry of Ariosto, Boiardo, and Spenser the categories tend to merge. One may also distinguish primary or traditional epic, shaped from the legends and traditions of a heroic age, from secondary or literary epic self-consciously produced by sophisticated poets adapting aspects of traditional epic for specific literary and ideological purposes. Homer's Iliad and Odyssey are primary epics; Virgil's Aeneid and Milton's Paradise Lost are secondary epics. While the Mesopotamian verse-narratives of Gilgamesh, dating from the 3rd millennium BC, have claims to constitute the earliest epic, the Homeric poems, which assumed their final form in the period 900750 BC, are usually regarded as the first important epics and the main source of epic conventions and characteristics in the secondary epics of western Europe. It is now generally agreed that such Homeric features as descriptive set-pieces, stock epithets, and formulaic phrases and lines for recurring elements of the poem are attributable to narrative and metrical convenience in improvised oral composition and transmission. The main aspects of epic convention are the centrality of a hero, sometimes semidivine, of military, national, or religious importance; an extensive, perhaps even cosmic, geographical setting; heroic battle; extended and often exotic journeying; and the involvement of supernatural beings in the action. Epics usually begin with a statement of the theme, invoking the assistance of a muse, and then plunge into the middle of the story, filling in the earlier stages later on with retrospective narrative by figures within the poem. Since epic subject matter tends to be familiar and traditional, this permits immediate dramatic involvement without bewildering the audience. Catalogs and processions of heroes, often associated with specific localities, are common, and when such heroes speak it is often in set speeches delivered in formal circumstances. Epic narrative is often enriched by extended epic similes that go beyond an initial point of correspondence to elaborate a whole scene or episode drawn from a different area of experience. The self-consciousness of literary epic and its cultural context in a post-heroic age encourage an element of criticism, ironic deployment, or even parody of standard epic materials and conventions. This is already present in the Aeneid, in which epic battle may be brutal and degrading as well as heroic, and Milton in Paradise Lost attributes to his villain Satan many of the characteristics of the old warring hero of epic tradition. The heroic world with its formal conventions, supernatural machinery, and epoch-making events may be used as a framework to recount trivial, squalid, or irreverent matters for satiric purposes in poems such as Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock and The Dunciad and Lord Byron's Don Juan. Henry Fielding exploited the dignity and structure of epic and a sense of its incongruity with contemporary experience with comic effect in Tom Jones, while later novels such as James Joyce's Ulysses have achieved epic stature by recreating Homeric materials. William Wordsworth's autobiographical poem The Prelude aspires to epic seriousness and uses the blank-verse medium of Milton's Paradise Lost for its portrait of an evolving poetic imagination. Primary epics registering heroic experience in the vernacular languages of Europe continued to appear long after Virgil popularized secondary epic. The Spanish Poema de mio Cid (Song of My Cid) celebrates the hero of the wars against the Moors in the 11th century; the 12th-century French La Chanson de Roland (The Song of Roland) commemorates an 8th-century battle in the Pyrenees between Charlemagne's army and the Saracens; the 13th-century German Nibelungenlied (Song of the Nibelungs) recounts a story that derived ultimately from the war between the Burgundians and the Huns in the 5th century; and the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf refers to historical characters and events of the 6th century as it describes Beowulf's struggles against the monsters that threaten the heroic fellowship of the mead-hall. But long before these poems assumed the form in which they now exist, the historical elements in them had passed into myth and attracted other legendary materials and themes from other periods and traditions. The Kalevala (1835; enlarged 1849; Land of Heroes), the Finnish national poem, is a synthetic primary epic that was composed by Elias Lnnrot, who incorporated ancient orally transmitted lays into a single narrative structure. The epic poem was generally regarded as a superseded form in the 20th century, but the scope and majesty of the genre were occasionally suggested by works in other forms, such as Frank Norris' unfinished trilogy of novels The Epic of the Wheat (190103) and Sergey Eisenstein's film Ivan the Terrible (Part I, 1944; Part II, 1958). J.R.R. Tolkien's fantasy trilogy The Lord of the Rings (195456) reflected the flavour and forms of Norse saga and Anglo-Saxon poetry in its epic narrative of adventures and quests in the realm of Middle Earth. Additional reading H.M. Chadwick, The Heroic Age (1912), and H.M. and N.K. Chadwick, The Growth of Literature, vol. 1, The Ancient Literatures of Europe (1932), are two classic works on European heroic poetries that are still valuable. A more comprehensive and up-to-date general survey is given in C.M. Bowra, Heroic Poetry (1952); and J. de Vries, Heldenlied und Heldensage (1961; Eng. trans., Heroic Song and Heroic Legend, 1963). A.B. Lord, The Singer of Tales (1960), was written by an authority on the Balkan oral epic of the guslari. On Homer, see G.S. Kirk, The Songs of Homer (1962); W. Schadewaldt, Von Homers Welt und Werk, 4th ed. (1965); C.M. Bowra, Homer and His Forerunners (1955); and R. Carpenter, Folk Tale, Fiction and Saga in the Homeric Epics (1946). F.R. Schroder, Germanische Heldendichtung (1935), is a basic reference book for the study of the Germanic epic. J.B. Pritchard, The Ancient Near East (1958), gives summaries and translations of Akkadian and Ugaritic epics. A theory of the epics of the Indo-Europeans is presented by G. Dumezil in Mythe et pope, vol. 12 (196871). For the use of mythical themes in the epics of the Indo-Europeans, see also D. Ward, The Divine Twins: An Indo-European Myth in Germanic Tradition (1968). Michael Murrin, The Allegorical Epic (1980), is a survey of the European tradition.