General Characteristics of Epics

• Great length
• Elevated language
• Narrative mode, great heroes and noble achievements.
• An opening invocation
• A favorite structural device of beginning in media res
• A lofty theme.
• The protagonist: human/semi-divine; the noblest of his race, dogged by a personal flaw
• The protagonist: usually a man, but women involved in crucial stages
• Background of an epochal event in the history of a race or nation
• The participation and/or intervention of divine will
• Minor parallel stories
• Poetic devices such as similes
• Repetition of descriptive passages as an aid to memory

Note on the cultural importance of the oral epic
From the Encyclopedia Britannica:

"...heroic exploits, mingled with adventures from myth and legend, naturally became the favoured theme for epic recitation, whose measured cadences and memorable phrases could keep past glory alive for the edification of the present and the emulation of the future. Presumably it was this lofty and serious subject matter which everywhere caused epic to express itself in a dignified and poetical vocabulary framed in many-syllabled lines or recurrent stanzas. Whatever similarity underlies the world's oral epic is hence ascribable to its identity of spiritual mood and cultural interest rather than to any diffusion of literary traditions."

BIBLIOGRAPHY (E.B., Vol. 8, p. 637)

Bowra, C.M. From Virgil to Milton (1945) First chapter on oral epic; remainder on written epic
Carpenter, Rhys. Folk Tale, Fiction and Saga in the Homeric Epics (1958)
Chadwick, H.M. The Heroic Age (1912) Oral epic
Chadwick, H.M. & N.K. The Growth of Literature , 3 vol. (1932-40). Extensive survey of oral epic.
Ker, W.P. Epic and Romance (1897)