Worlds within Books: The Fantasy Epic

In literature, an "epic" is a long narrative about the deeds of a hero in a serious tone and often dealing with real-world issues. The epic is one of the oldest forms of written stories and originated in poetry like Beowulf, Homer's Odyssey and The Epic of Gilgamesh, all of which are ancient literary prizes.

More recently, the term has come to refer to prose: stories about idealistic heroes and their impressive journeys that often dealt with topics not entirely of-this-world. Those stories didn't become common until the literary Romantic period which rose in Europe in the late 1700s and peaked around 1850. Everyone is familiar with at least some of the artists and authors from the Romantic period, some of the most famous being Edgar Allen Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

I would argue that writers like Poe and Hawthorne fathered the modern transition into fantasy literature and the roots of the movement are much deeper in literary history than many insist (as J.R.R. Tolkien is generally credited with starting the trend). Poe and Hawthorne specifically wrote about the supernatural, the occult and the deeper aspects of psychology including mental illness.

Poe especially delved into the seriousness of human psychology with jarring tales like Berenice or descriptive narratives like The Raven.

The link that makes Romantic literature correspond so well to the ancient art of epic poetry is its seriousness. Romantics openly criticized satire and general humor in literature, because to them it was not truly "art."

Now, cut forward two hundred years and we see the epic making its comeback in the form of high fantasy - which is sometimes conveniently known as "epic fantasy."

Perhaps the most relevant example of the scope epic fantasy would be A Song of Ice and Fire in which George R.R. Martin employs the points of view of some thirty-six characters within the first five books of his series to tell a story spanning continents and kingdoms.

We all learned about the hero's cycle in high school English class. You know, the hero has a call to arms and a fatal flaw and the journey changes him and blah blah blah. The Lord of the Rings provides a good look at how the hero's journey plays perfectly into fantasy. The journey makes the story more epic than the setting.

However, it's a lesser-known series that encompasses all those aspects - scope, journey, basic epicness - in a way that defines fantasy literature. That's The Malazan Book of the Fallen, a ten-piece series by Steven Erikson that was perhaps the fantasy world's first look at grimdark as well.

Reading the Malazan series is no small task, but if you're up for the challenge, I highly recommend the read as Erikson's brainchild is one of the most brilliant stories I have ever been fortunate enough to absorb.