It arose long before writing; At the beginning of the first civilizations, when people felt the desire to celebrate the works, with which their ancestors made a name in the world.
Epic poetry narrates the exploits of heroes, related to a legendary past, whose glorious behavior makes them a model of virtue (courage, nobility, fidelity, etc.). This type of poetry at the beginning, was narrated in sung by professionals and with musical accompaniment. It is an objective poetry since the poet acts as a simple narrator of events not related to him.
In general, the protagonists of these works narrated in epic poetry are not mere mortals. They are heroes who face the most difficult situations and leave them victorious. Epic poetry does not show the weakness of the hero, but his human character that is superior to that of other mortals.
Here is one of the many epic poems in history:
- Homer's Iliad (around the 9th century BC), which narrates, in 15,696 verses, the siege of the city of Troy by the Greeks, which lasted ten years. In the countless adventures of war that have taken place in this long period, the most famous heroes of the great Greek epic literature appear.
- Homer's Odyssey, which narrates, in 12,007 verses, the adventures of Ulysses, the cunning king of Ithaca, the last of the heroes who participated in the Trojan War and returned to his native land.
- The Epic of Gilgamesh, the Assyro-Babylonian national poem, which chronicles the companies of the hero Gilgamesh, in search of immortality.
- The story of Zarer, a Persian work from the 5th century after Christ, in which the struggles through which the Zoroastrian religion spread are remembered.
- Mahabharala, an Indian poem of enormous length (110,000 stanzas!), Which was composed by several authors, between 400 BC. C. and 400 of our era. It is a true encyclopedia of Indian civilization.
One of its main characteristics is:
It has the following variants or sub-genres: epic, epic song, epic cult poem, romance, traditional story, myth, legend, story, novel. Each, in turn, has different types or classes of texts, especially myth, traditional history, and the novel.
- This can be in two ways: direct and indirect.
- They can be based indistinctly on real or invented events.
- The narration is done in the past.
- The narrator may or may not appear in the work, but is not always present, as in the lyrical genre, or disappears entirely, as in the dramatic genre.
- The form that is preferably used in the epic or narrative literary work is prose or long verse (hexameter, Alexandrian verse…)
- It tends to include other genres (lyrical, dramatic, didactic), so it is usually the one with the greatest length.
- It can present divisions in its external structure, such as chapters, epigraphs.
