This Was Epic…

Introduction

Throughout centuries of writing, literary scholars established certain genres and addressed them to specific historical eras. For example, the Gothic genre is something that literary scholars associate with the gothic movement. It served as a response against the Enlightenment which positioned itself as the status quo. The Breton lay was a genre that made its fame and fortune specifically during the Middle English period. This article wants to address how the epic genre behaved as a historical genre but faded in history. How did this genre become obsolete?

What is epic?

The epic is a genre which gains its name for being obviously epic, and it comes from the ancient world. What do I mean by this ancient world? I meant as in ancient Greece. The Odyssey and Iliad are both epics. An epic’s goal is to transform an event and record it into history as something spectacular. Homer’s (although it remains disputable whether this was one man or not) two epics serve as a good example. The Trojan War was heavily, as in REALLY heavily, mythologised by the writer(-s) of the Odyssey and Iliad. We know from archaeological findings that the Trojan War took place in modern Turkey, but we cannot scientifically seem to agree with the manner how it was fought, as how it is proposed in the Iliad. We, therefore, speak of an epic.

But what is an epic according to my ever faithful companion? An epic is a ‘poem, typically derived from ancient oral tradition, which celebrates in the form of a continuous narrative the achievements of one or more heroic characters of history or legend’.¹ It resonates extremely well to what I already discussed above. There is one thing worth noticing, and that needs to be highlighted; the epic genre tended to hail from poetic oral tradition. Did the English language had an epic? Yes, English literature possesses some great epics. One of them is naturally the Old English Beowulf. Another, more modern, epic would be Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

The Early Modern period and the epic

The Early Modern period is often referred to as a period that established the ground foundation for modern literature. Many people still recall the works of William Shakespeare and classify them as Old English literature. This is too much frustration to one of my former philology professors who even made certain memes about this. No! To clarify it here once more, Shakespeare cannot be considered Old English. Old English was the language of the Anglo-Saxons, as in the Germanic tribes who settled into England and reigned there from roughly 440–1066 AD. Shakespeare’s English can be classified as ‘Modern English’.

Despite the greatness and legacy of William Shakespeare to English literature, there were two specific pieces of literature that are epics in this period. These involve Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590–96) and John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667). This section wants to highlight Milton’s epic.

John Milton’s Paradise Lost is often praised for its particular genre: the epic. Milton did not leave much over to the imagination about who his inspirations were:

Time serves not now, and perhaps I might seem too profuse to give any certain account of what the mind at home in the spacious circuits of her musing hath liberty to propose to her self, though of highest hope, and hardest attempting, whether that Epick form whereof the two poems of Homer, and those other two of Virgil and Tasso are a diffuse, and the book of Job a brief model: or whether the rules of Aristotle herein are strictly to be kept, or nature to be follow’d, which in them that know art, and use judgement is no transgression, but an enriching of art.²

This poem was written in 1642. It is intriguing to see that John Milton already possessed a certain opinion regarding the epic, and how he plays around with the words musing, liberty and justice. All of them made their way towards his Paradise Lost, as the heavenly muses, as like within any classical epic, are called upon:

Sing Heav’nly Muse, that on the secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire…
Above th’ Aonian mount, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme. (ll. 6–16)³

John Milton seemed to have been quite aware of what he was making. The following artist was not as obvious in his text.

Tolkien and the epic

J.R.R. Tolkien was one of the few modern authors who wanted to revive the lost art of writing an epic. He succeeded in doing so and composed both the famous The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954–5). Furthermore, Mark Atherton provides the fact that there ‘is no doubt that Old English informed his imaginative writing significantly… In using Old English, Tolkien began with names and locations, single words and personal names, out of which he wove his larger stories and themes; it is clear that within Old English language and literature, he found ways of thought that chimed with his own’.⁴ He did not merely ‘found ways’ in English philology, which was his nine-to-five job at university. Tolkien found ways to let his fiction be in the same ‘tradition’ as his artistic English forebears. This is, for example, seen in the way how he utilised alliteration throughout his poetry and plots.

Tolkien must have known that he revived the genre of epic as well. He even became known as the father of epic fantasy. But what is epic fantasy? Brian Attebery introduce his view upon epic fantasy as ‘its protagonist is the world. Even as it invites us to focus briefly on this personal interaction, that heroic effort, it keeps the big picture in front of us’.⁵ When relating this defined terminology to Tolkien, one could draw parallels. For example, in The Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins is the main hero and protagonist. The reader views the world from his point of view. It holds, of course, true that the dwarves serve as the quest givers in the story. Yet, the real hero remains Bilbo. He is the Hobbit, and the title magically refers to his epic tale of the Lonely Mountain.

Verdict

This article wanted to address a genre that was present in English literature in the past, but I feel that it is slowly fading into the background again. Milton’s Paradise Lost was along with Spenser’s The Faerie Queene one of the bigger English epics of the Early Modern period. It was not until Tolkien that the epic finally made its safe return again.

While I do not necessarily believe that the epic was faded out of English literary history until Tolkien, the following article wants to expand on this. Its goal shall be to look for other potential epics in English literature that I have missed. Is it true that the epic is solely bound towards poetic oral tradition? Was the transition from oral poetry to a written one the main cause for its popular decline throughout history? Tolkien managed to create a new genre called epic fantasy. What other genres have derived from the epic?

This article wanted to discuss the possibility why the epic genre became extinct in English literature. It failed to give a proper answer as of yet. There shall be more discussed about this topic!