Epicness

[kippurbird]

Today's question: What makes something epic?

It occurs to me to ask this question because of Paolini's assertions that he is trying to write an epic like Beowulf and the Lord of the Rings. However his work is clearly not epic. But why then? What makes something epic?

The dictionary definition isn't very helpful.

One definition is thus:

epic

A long narrative poem written in elevated style, in which heroes of great historical or legendary importance perform valorous deeds. The setting is vast in scope, covering great nations, the world, or the universe, and the action is important to the history of a nation or people. The Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid are some great epics from world literature, and two great epics in English are Beowulf and Paradise Lost.

^[1]


Most of the other definitions refer to poetry as well. But something can be teased out of this. "The setting is vast in scope covering great nations, the world, or the universe and the action is important to he history of a nation or people." An epic is supposed to be huge. Not in the number of pages but in the scope. In the What Is At Stake.

Some examples that could be considered epic in today's fantasy writing are Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time and Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series. While Mercedes Lacky on the other hand has written more books, they tend to fall into more personal stories. There is not the "end of the world" urgency in them like there is for Goodkind's and Jordan's books.

If, for example, Richard Rahl, in the Sword of Truth, doesn't stop the Evil Emperor Jagang all of magic will be destroyed and their freedom and way of life will be ground into a bloody mess. In Lord of the Rings, if Frodo doesn't get rid of the One Ring then Sauron will be able to take over the world and enslave everyone.

However in the Inheritance Cycle there is not this urgency. There is no urgency. Three books in and there is nothing to stop. Eragon doesn't have to stop Galbatorix from taking over, he's already done so. He doesn't have to stop the emperor from doing anything to destroy the world. Galbatorix is a completely passive figure in this books. Everything Eragon does is small things. Nothing he does will stop Galbatorix from gaining more power.

Eragon is not a threat.

What does he do? He destroys some minions, the Ra'zac and Durza. But Galbatorix has more and it could be said that Murtagh and Thorn are even more effective than the Ra'zac because he's a dragon rider. He has access to more power. He fights off an army, but it's not a battle for anything. There's nothing at stake.

And this is why it's not epic. This is what makes something have the potential to be epic. The stakes.

The bigger the stakes the more dangerous the challenge that the heroes have to overcome and the harder it is for them.

If something is to be epic in scope then it has to include things that are more than personal trials. It's not one life at risk. It's entire cities at risk.

Admittedly a lot of times it seems like only the Chosen One can stop the Great Evil or End of the World, but that's part of what makes it epic. The overwhelming forces against the one person. There are the armies to help, but it's only the One who can stop the Evil Overlord.

Using the definition the Harry Potter books could be considered an epic. It's Harry, a teenage boy vs. Voldemort, a man who wishes to enslave the non-magical population. The battle fields are small, but the stakes are high.

Again back to the Inheritance Cycle. What is the problem Eragon has to solve to stop Galbatorix in Eragon or Eldest or Brisingr? What does he have to do to stop Galbatorix from gaining more power. In Eragon he got the dragon but that doesn't stop Galbatorix, he has two more eggs. In Eldest he gets magic training but that doesn't prove a threat to Galbatorix he has Murtagh, someone who wasn't even revealed until the very end of the book. Eragon never has to try and get training so he can best Murtagh. And in Brisingr? He gets a shiny sword. Which... is a shiny sword, but not an issue for Galbatorix. These are small and personal problems.

The language is the language of a would-be-epic, written in an "elevated style". But even that isn't done well. It's trying for epic. Paolini gets too wrapped up in describing things in interesting metaphors that he forgets the bigger picture of things. He's "fallen in love with the fly" as Natalie Goldberg says in her book, Writing Down the Bones^[2]. He lovingly describes an arrow wound which stalls the story instead of giving it more depth. His lyricism is that of un-rhyming poetry, jolting and haphazard. Images appear but aren't connected to anything. The point of the elevated style is to create a fully painted image of the world and the people that live there.

What happens ultimately is that Paolini tries for epic, but because there are no stakes ultimately he has a hollow story. A story that is a mere shadow of what an epic could be but with no substance.



--------------

^[1]
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Epic

^[2]
Goldberg, Natalie; Writing Down the Bones. Shambhala Publications; 1986

Comments

[ceitfianna]

I always think of epic as something that involves many levels of an entire world or part of a world and the story from its smallest parts to its grandest all fits together and in the end the choices made change the way everyone in that world lives and thinks about things.

[smurasaki.livejournal.com]

What's really bad is that the books lack even the tension and stakes of non-epic fantasy. Eragon isn't traveling through a land that's suffering at Galbie's hand while trying to find a widget to defeat him or struggling to master his powers before the Varden are wiped out. He's wandering about doing...nothing. He's not even doing nothing urgently. He's all "Oh, yeah, maybe I need a sword. Maybe I'll look into that after nap time."

I think Paolini may have invented the anti-epic.

[torylltales.livejournal.com]

If he has, it's certainly a very epic anti-epic.

That was, of course, a pun, playing on the internet-slang of using 'epic' as shorthand for 'very', as in 'epic fail'.

[torylltales.livejournal.com]

Very true! I wrote a mini-rant a year or two back about my thoughts on epics. Suffice to say, I much prefer a smaller, more personal story whwere the character's relationships, motives and reactions take precedence over the actual plot.

[eddiesteddy4711.livejournal.com]

That's why, much as I love the Wheel of Time series, I really enjoy the Valdemar series. It's sort of my guilty pleasure - I read them when I don't want to read about the whole world in peril XD

Unless, of course, it's the Mage Storms trilogy :P

[easol.livejournal.com]

Personally I consider it epic as well when the author is CONVINCING in portraying the extent and depth of their world, as well as a realistic threat that could destroy it all. That's pretty rare.

And yeah, there's no risk involved in letting Galby be -- he'll tax you a little like every monarch EVER, but he's not going to suddenly blow up your city out of nowhere. Look at the Empire in SW4 -- they blew up Leia's planet because... well, because they could, and to really slam it home that they had her over a barrel.

Eragon, though -- Paolini seems to think that having a Designated Villain is enough of a threat in itself, without the villain actually doing anything. Would Frodo have gone scampering to Mount Doom to destroy the Ring if Sauron were just planning to sit up on Barad-Dur and do nothing? If he had left Minas Tirith alone, and hadn't sent his orcs out to kill anyone, etc?

You should totally post this on antishurtugal.

[dove-cg.livejournal.com]

You know, I think that's part of the problem right there. Paolini is trying to invoke Sauron without knowing what made Sauron work as an epic villain. Tolkien convinces us of Sauron's evil bit by bit. It's slower and sprinkled through-out. And we don't see the true depth of it until later.

[jacedraccus.livejournal.com]

You did get an immediate threat though, in the terms of the Riders, and Gollum. Eragon doesn't even get that much.

[dove-cg.livejournal.com]

It was bugging me all this time but I couldn't put my finger on it. I think you've got it exactly. So far Galby and Eragon are just ships passing in the night. There isn't even a true villain-hero relationship of any sort between them. Not really! Galby threatens nothing particular. Certainly not his neighbors. We don't even know what he does for the most part. And Eragon is the same way, even when we see what he does. I'm almost certain that if Paolini had written the whole thing from Galby's PoV, there would be the same problem. Except we'd get some notion of Galby's boring-ass useless escapades instead. :P

... Paolini has written two of the biggest failures of Epic Hero and Epic Villain ever. x_x;

[the-norseman.livejournal.com]

There's no end of the world urgency in the Odyssey or the Iliad. In fact the Iliad is about a group of bronze age chieftains who go out to loot a city, while the Odyssey is a man returning from war.

I think a better definition of what made a good epic is that the stakes should be high enough to be interesting, while the scale is small enough to be personal. That applies to both the Odyssey and the Iliad, as well as other epics like the Argonautica. More to the point I'd say that it is very hard to make a story about the end of the world all that exciting, the stakes are too high to be readily comprehensible and so is the scale. It is easier to get excited about the possible destruction of a city, or even a village, than the world.

[jacedraccus.livejournal.com]

The Iliad DOES feature a huge war though, with a lot of heroes, while the Odyssey crosses an ocean full of threats and peril and strange creatures. He even goes to the afterlife and returns.

Looked at in that light, they do kinda fit the definition of 'epic' as suggested by Kippur. True, the stakes aren't exactly far reaching, but they're still grand adventure stories.

I do agree that it doesn't have to be Armageddon to be an epic.... really, I think it's just that our personal understanding of 'epic' has changed because we don't use long-form poems to tell stories anymore.

[ravenswept.livejournal.com]

I think part of what makes epic "epic", is time . The Odyssey , while usually portrayed as a matter of weeks or months, took place of the course of several years ; the Iliad was not some quick battle, but a siege, one that was not broken by some single hero with ta uberpower-up in single one-on-one combat, but carefully trickery and preparation.

Paolini has had Eragon on the run for...what, maybe six months? Total? With no reason why he needs to hurry, just "you must be trained in the Jedi ways". Nothing is really drawn out or needful, just a rush to get from Point A to Point B, with periods of prose to tell us what happened at those points, regardless of whether it can (or will) actually tie into anything, rinse, repeat. They need to defeat Galbo "soon" but with no worry of when "soon" comes that anything will happen.

[dove-cg.livejournal.com]

They need to defeat Galbo "soon" but with no worry of when "soon" comes that anything will happen.

The fact that no one seems to have any terms for specific days, months, or years (or else it's rarely mentioned) doesn't help. Unless Paolini has and Kippur hasn't mentioned it? XD

[cogitoergoilusi.livejournal.com]

From my interpretation, content has little to do with it. Epic is a style of narrative poem. It deals with one great heroic action, typically historical. Characters are 'grand' and style 'elevated'. Scope doesn't really matter. It could take place in a bathtub where Tommyous must overcome the man-eating whirlpool Charyboring to save the inhabitants of Rubland Duckia.

That's what Paolini's trying to do with his all-powerful characters and overblown descriptions. But an epic also needs to be epically exciting all the time, and if you get bored, it's over. Normally character depth doesn't matter, but Paolini's doing such a bad job of it he should have never bothered in the first place.

[1] Krummel Dora, 1993, The Art of Speech, Boolarong Publications, Brisbane.
(Maybe not the most current source, and there are some parts my teacher disagree with, but its works for basic information. Also I plagiarised, sorry.)

[kevias.livejournal.com]

What's missing is narrative tension. No one seems to have the opportunity to choose anything, leaving the plot to basically run on rails.

In the Lord of the Rings, Frodo didn't have to take the One Ring to Mount Doom, he could have given it to Aragorn and let him handle it. He chose to do the brave thing, and what makes it brave is that he had the opportunity to say no. In addition, he had to decide whether or not to stay with the rest of the party, and risk corrupting them, or risk being unprotected. He also had to choose whether or not to allow Gollum to live. These were major decisions, and no one forced or commanded him to go one way or the other.

Eragon, by contrast, does no such choosing. He can't choose to run away or quit because he's tied to a dragon who won't let him. He binds himself to Nasuada as a vassal, and so all of his actions are chosen by her, not him. He is called to train under Oromis, and no hint is given of alternative courses of action. He's backed into one corner after another, and never allowed the opportunity to make decisions. First he follows and obeys Brom, then Oromis and Nasuada. The only real decision he's made so far is the one on Sloan, and even his choice there would be (narratively) all right if only every other character didn't come around to his point of view.

[dove-cg.livejournal.com]

He binds himself to Nasuada as a vassal, and so all of his actions are chosen by her, not him.

I would say you're right except I don't recall evidence of the above. It seems like no one really listens to Nasuada.