What is epic?

 An ambiguous term, "epic" is used most often to designate a long narrative poem recounting heroic deeds, though it 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 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 the anonymus Beowulf are primary epics; Milton's Paradise Lost is secondary epic.
 


Main function

 The main function of epic in heroic-age society appears to be to stir the spirit of the warriors to heroic actions by praising their exploits and those of their illustrious ancestors, by assuring a long and glorious recollection of their fame, and by supplying them with models of ideal heroic behaviour. One of the favorite pastimes of the nobility in heroic ages in different times and places has been to gather in banquet halls to hear heroic songs, in praise of famous deeds sung by professional singers as well as by the warriors themselves.
 Heroic songs also were often sung before a battle, and such recitations had tremendous effect on the morale of the combatants. Among the Fulani (Fulbe) people in The Sudan, for instance, whose epic poetry has been recorded, a nobleman customarily set out in quest of adventures accompanied by a singer (mabo), who also served as his shield bearer. The singer was thus the witness of the heroic deeds of his lord, which he celebrated in an epic poem called baudi.
The aristocratic warriors of the heroic ages were thus members of an illustrious family, a link in a long chain of glorious heroes. And the chain could snap if the warrior failed to preserve the honour of the family, whereas, by earning fame through his own heroism, he could give it new lustre. Epic traditions were to a large extent the traditions of the aristocratic families: the Old French word geste, used for a form of epic that flourished in the Middle Ages, means not only a story of famous deeds but also a genealogy.
 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 900-750 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.

Main aspects
 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, but with a real geographical setting; heroic battle; an incredible and often exotic journey, often with the main pourpose to find a weapon capable of defeating a powerful evil character, in which he will be followed by a faithful comrade. Also, it is usual 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 most popular epic works

 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, but it is more clear after Cervantes´ Don Quijote de la Mancha, a supreme parody of the medieval epic, where the standards of epic are destroyed. After Cervantes, many authors have followed his path. 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. The main difference of this authors with the primary epic is that they do not follow the rules of primary epic and develop some ãepic charactersä but leaving apart the supernatural.
 Primary epics registering heroic experience in the vernacular languages of Europe reappeared in the middle ages. 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; ãLand of Heroesä), the Finnish national poem, is a synthetic primary epic that was composed by Elias Lönnrot, who incorporated ancient orally transmitted lays into a single narrative structure.
 The epic poem was generally regarded as a superseded form around the middle of the 20th century, but the scope and majesty of the genre was introduced by works in other forms, such as Frank Norris' unfinished trilogy of novels The Epic of the Wheat (1901-03) and Sergey Eisenstein's film Ivan the Terrible (Part I, 1944; Part II, 1958). But the main contribution was J.R.R. Tolkien's fantasy trilogy The Lord of the Rings (1954-56). This saga 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.
 
 


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