Epic & Mock-epic
An epic is a long narrative poem that is elevated and dignified in theme, tone, and style. As a literary device, an epic celebrates heroic deeds and historically (or even cosmically) important events.
An epic usually focuses on the adventures of a hero who has qualities that are superhuman or divine, and on whose very fate often depends the destiny of a tribe, nation, or sometimes the whole of the human race.
The English word epic comes from the Latin epicus, which itself comes from the Ancient Greek adjective ἐπικός (epikos), from ἔπος (epos), "word, story, poem."
In ancient Greek, 'epic' could refer to all poetry in dactylic hexameter (epea), which included not only Homer but also the wisdom poetry of Hesiod, the utterances of the Delphic oracle, and the strange theological verses attributed to Orpheus. Later tradition, however, has restricted the term 'epic' to heroic epic, as described in this article.
The oldest epic recognized is the Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 2500–1300 BCE), which was recorded in ancient Sumer during the Neo-Sumerian Empire. The poem details the exploits of Gilgamesh, the king of Uruk. Although recognized as a historical figure, Gilgamesh, as represented in the epic, is a largely legendary or mythical figure.
The longest epic written is the ancient Indian Mahabharata (c. 3rd century BC—3rd century AD), which consists of 100,000 ślokas or over 200,000 verse lines (each shloka is a couplet), as well as long prose passages, so that at ~1.8 million words it is roughly twice the length of Shahnameh, four times the length of the Rāmāyaṇa, and roughly ten times the length of the Iliad and the Odyssey combined.
The Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid are considered the most important epics in western world literature, although this literary device has been utilized across regions and cultures.
Characteristics of an Epic
Though the epic is not a frequently used literary device today, its lasting influence on poetry is unmistakable. Traditionally, epic poetry shares certain characteristics that identify it as both a literary device and poetic form. Here are some typical characteristics of an epic:
- written in formal, elevated, dignified style
- third-person narration with omniscient narrator
- begins with invocation to a muse who provides inspiration and guides the poet
- includes a journey that crosses a variety of large settings and terrains
- takes place across lengthy time spans and/or in an era beyond the range of living memory
- features a central hero who is incredibly brave and resolute
- includes obstacles and/or circumstances that are supernatural or otherworldly so as to create almost impossible odds against the hero
- reflects concern as to the future of a civilization or culture
Famous Examples of Literary Epics
Epic poems can be traced back to some of the earliest civilizations in human history, in Europe and Asia, and are therefore some of the earliest works of literature as well.
Literary epics reflect heroic deeds and events that reveal significance to the culture of the poet.
In addition, epic poetry allowed ancient writers to relay stories of great adventures and heroic actions.
The effect of epics was to commemorate the struggles and adventures of the hero to elevate their status and inspire the audience.
Here are some famous examples of literary epics:
- The Iliad and The Odyssey: epic poems attributed to Homer between 850 and 650 BC. These poems describe the events of the Trojan War and King Odysseus’s return journey from Troy, and were initially conveyed in the oral tradition.
- The Mahābhārata: epic poem from ancient India composed in Sanskrit.
- The Aeneid: epic poem composed in Latin by Virgil, a Roman poet, between 29 and 19 BC. This is a narrative poem that relates the story of Aeneas, a Trojan descendent and forebear to the Romans.
- Beowulf: epic poem written in Old English between 975 and 1025 AD. It is not attributed to an author, but is known for the conflict between Beowulf, a Scandinavian hero, and the monster Grendel.
- The Nibelungenlied: epic narrative poem written in Middle High German, c. 1200 AD. Its subject is Siegfried, a legendary hero in German mythology.
- The Divine Comedy: epic poem by Dante Alighieri and completed in 1320. Its subject is a detailed account of Dante as a character traveling through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven.
- The Faerie Queene: epic poem by Edmund Spenser published in 1590 and given to Elizabeth I. This poem features an invocation of the muse and is the work in which Spenser invented the verse form later known as the Spenserian stanza.
- Paradise Lost: written by John Milton in blank verse form and published in 1667. Its subject is the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden as well as the fallen angel Satan.
Difference Between Epic and Ballad
Both epic and ballad works date back to ancient history and were passed down from one generation to another through oral poetry.
However, these literary devices feature significant differences. An epic is an extended narrative poem composed with elevated and dignified language that celebrates the acts of a legendary or traditional hero.
A ballad is also a narrative poem that is adapted for people to sing or recite and intended to convey sentimental or romantic themes in short stanzas, usually quatrains with repeating rhyme scheme.
Ballads typically feature common, colloquial language to represent day-to-day life, and they are designed to have universal appeal to humanity as a group.
Epic works, however, focus on a certain culture, race, nation, or religious group whose victory or failure determines the fate of an entirety of a nation or larger group but not all of humanity.
Mock-epic
Mock-heroic, mock-epic or heroi-comic works are typically satires or parodies that mock common Classical stereotypes of heroes and heroic literature. Typically, mock-heroic works either put a fool in the role of the hero or exaggerate the heroic qualities to such a point that they become absurd.
Historically, the mock-heroic style was popular in 17th-century Italy, and in the post-Restoration and Augustan periods in Great Britain.
The earliest example of the form is the Batrachomyomachia ascribed to Homer by the Romans and parodying his work, but believed by most modern scholars to be the work of an anonymous poet in the time of Alexander the Great.
A longstanding assumption on the origin of the mock-heroic in the 17th century is that epic and the pastoral genres had become used up and exhausted, and so they got parodically reprised.
In the 17th century the epic genre was heavily criticized, because it was felt expressing the traditional values of the feudal society.
Among the new genres, closer to the modern feelings and proposing new ideals, the satirical literature was particularly effective in criticizing the old habits and values.
Beside the Spanish picaresque novels and the French burlesque novel, in Italy flourished the poema eroicomico.
In this country those who still wrote epic poems, following the rules set by Torquato Tasso in his work Discorsi del poema eroico (Discussions about the Epic Poems) and realized in his masterwork, the Jerusalem Delivered, were felt as antiquated.
The new mock-heroic poem accepted the same metre, vocabulary, rhetoric of the epics. However, the new genre turned the old epic upside down about the meaning, setting the stories in more familiar situations, to ridiculize the traditional epics. In this context was created the parody of epic genre.
Lo scherno degli dèi (The Mockery of Gods) by Francesco Bracciolini, printed in 1618 is often regarded as the first Italian poema eroicomico.
However, the best known of the form is La secchia rapita (The rape of the Bucket) by Alessandro Tassoni (1622).
Other Italian mock-heroic poems were La Gigantea by Girolamo Amelonghi (1566), the Viaggio di Colonia (Travel to Cologne) by Antonio Abbondanti (1625), L'asino (The donkey) by Carlo de' Dottori (1652), La Troja rapita by Loreto Vittori (1662), Il malmantile racquistato by Lorenzo Lippi (1688), La presa di San Miniato by Ippolito Neri (1764).
Also in Italian dialects were written mock-heroic poems. For example, in Neapolitan dialect the best known work of the form was La Vaiasseide by Giulio Cesare Cortese (1612).
While in Romanesco Giovanni Camillo Peresio wrote Il maggio romanesco (1688), Giuseppe Berneri published Meo Patacca in 1695, and, finally, Benedetto Micheli printed La libbertà romana acquistata e defesa in 1765.
After the translation of Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes, English authors began to imitate the inflated language of Romance poetry and narrative to describe misguided or common characters.
The most likely genesis for the mock-heroic, as distinct from the picaresque, burlesque, and satirical poem is the comic poem Hudibras (1662–1674), by Samuel Butler. Butler's poem describes a "trew blew" Puritan knight during the Interregnum, in language that imitates Romance and epic poetry. After Butler, there was an explosion of poetry that described a despised subject in the elevated language of heroic poetry and plays.
Hudibras gave rise to a particular verse form, commonly called the "Hudibrastic". The Hudibrastic is poetry in closed rhyming couplets in iambic tetrameter, where the rhymes are often feminine rhymes or unexpected conjunctions.
For example, Butler describes the English Civil War as a time which "Made men fight like mad or drunk/ For dame religion as for punk/ Whose honesty all durst swear for/ Tho' not one knew why or wherefore" ("punk" meaning a prostitute).
The strained and unexpected rhymes increase the comic effect and heighten the parody. This formal indication of satire proved to separate one form of mock-heroic from the others. After Butler, Jonathan Swift is the most notable practitioner of the Hudibrastic, as he used that form for almost all of his poetry.
Poet Laureate John Dryden is responsible for some of the dominance among satirical genres of the mock-heroic in the later Restoration era. While Dryden's own plays would themselves furnish later mock-heroics (specifically, The Conquest of Granada is satirized in the mock-heroic The Author's Farce and Tom Thumb by Henry Fielding, as well as The Rehearsal), Dryden's Mac Flecknoe is perhaps the locus classicus of the mock-heroic form as it would be practiced for a century to come.
In that poem, Dryden indirectly compares Thomas Shadwell with Aeneas by using the language of Aeneid to describe the coronation of Shadwell on the throne of Dullness formerly held by King Flecknoe.
The parody of Virgil satirizes Shadwell. Dryden's prosody is identical to regular heroic verse: iambic pentameter closed couplets. The parody is not formal, but merely contextual and ironic. (For an excellent overview of the history of the mock-heroic in the 17th and 18th centuries see "the English Mock-Heroic poem of the 18th Century" by Grazyna Bystydzienska, published by Polish Scientific Publishers, 1982.)
After Dryden, the form continued to flourish, and there are countless minor mock-heroic poems from 1680 to 1780.
Additionally, there were a few attempts at a mock-heroic novel. The most significant later mock-heroic poems were by Alexander Pope. Pope’s The Rape of the Lock is a noted example of the Mock-Heroic style; indeed, Pope never deviates from mimicking epic poetry such as Homer's Iliad and Virgil's Aeneid .
The overall form of the poem, written in cantos, follows the tradition of epics, along with the precursory “Invocation of the Muse”; in this case, Pope's Muse is literally the person who prodded him to write the poem, John Caryll: “this verse to Caryll, Muse, is due!” (line 3).
Epics always include foreshadowing which is usually given by an otherworldly figure, and Pope mocks tradition through Ariel the sprite, who sees some “dread event” (line 109) impending on Belinda.
These epic introductory tendencies give way to the main portion of the story, usually involving a battle of some kind (such as in the Iliad) that follows this pattern: dressing for battle (description of Achilles shield, preparation for battle), altar sacrifice/libation to the gods, some battle change (perhaps involving drugs), treachery (Achilles ankle is told to be his weak spot), a journey to the Underworld, and the final battle. All of these elements are followed eloquently by Pope in that specific order: Belinda readies herself for the card game (which includes a description of her hair and beauty), the Baron makes a sacrifice for her hair (the altar built for love and the deal with Clarissa), the “mock” battle of cards changes in the Baron’s favor, Clarissa’s treachery to her supposed friend Belinda by slipping the Baron scissors, and finally the treatment of the card game as a battle and the Baron’s victory.
Pope’s mastery of the Mock-Heroic is clear in every instance. Even the typical apotheosis found in the epics is mimicked in The Rape of the Lock, as “the stars inscribe Belinda’s name!” (line 150). He invokes the same Mock-heroic style in The Dunciad which also employs the language of heroic poetry to describe menial or trivial subjects. In this mock-epic the progress of Dulness over the face of the earth, the coming of stupidity and tastelessness, is treated in the same way as the coming of civilization is in the Aeneid (see also the metaphor of translatio studii). John Gay's Trivia and Beggar's Opera were mock-heroic (the latter in opera), and Samuel Johnson's London is a mock-heroic of a sort.
By the time of Pope, however, the mock-heroic was giving ground to narrative parody, and authors such as Fielding led the mock-heroic novel into a more general novel of parody. The ascension of the novel drew a slow end to the age of the mock-heroic, which had originated in Cervantes's novel. After Romanticism's flourishing, mock-heroics like Byron's Don Juan were uncommon.
Finally, the mock-heroic genre spread throughout Europe, in France, in Scotland, in Poland, in Bohemia, in Russia.