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At the beginning of n. k. Jemisin's award-winning trilogy The Broken Earth, the narrator sets the stage in the grandest possible way: "Let's start with the end of the world, why don't we?" Later, after talking about more personal tragedies, this is amended to "Let's try the ending again, writ continentally." That seems to me to be a good definition of epic fantasy: a story writ continentally (or oceanically or astronomically). Conventional fiction takes a narrower view of its task: to tell the story of an individual or a marriage or a career. It sometimes uses those individuals as filters through which to consider moments of historical change: a reform, a battle, a revolution. But an epic thinks globally: 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.
Any use of the term "epic" directly or indirectly refers to the Greek oral narratives that we ascribe to Homer. Epos meant a song, but not just any song. These were the big songs: stories of battles and sea voyages and squabbling gods and heroes. Fusing secular history and scripture, they were compendia of knowledge about the world of Bronze Age Greece and its environs. Two survive; others we know from fragments and contemporary references. We understand from the work of Milman Parry and Albert Lord how they must have come about: talented singers recreating the stories in performance, drawing on formulaic phrases, lines, and scenes. They are the product of a particular social system involving courtly sponsorship and a long apprenticeship, recorded by scribes during the overlap between oral culture and literacy.
The word epic was applied to written imitations of Homer in GrecoRoman culture and thence to Christian-era adaptations of the form like The Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost. At the same time, the term began to be extended to long narratives from other traditions: Old English and Sanskrit and Babylonian and eventually the South Slavic songs that Parry and...