Talk:List of world folk-epics

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Is the Aeneid really considered an folk-epic? It was written, very deliberately, by a single author.

Well, most of these are, really. What bothers me more is that novels, sagas, operas, and a lot of other stuff has been lumped together as "epic". Why not include comic books, movies, and television shows? An epic is supposed to be a poem -- to be reluctant to call a grand prose work an "epic" is not to denigrate it, but simply to recognize that it is in a different genre. Perhaps there should be a section for "prose epics".

IMO, the critical part of a folk-epic is the 'folk' aspect. I've always found that the best writing transcends the boundaries between prose and poetry, so if a people's weltanschauung plays a dominant role in the work, specific points of style like the distinction between prose and poetry matter a whole lot less. Single-authorship I'd say is a bigger hurdle, but even there, as long as it can be established that the work exemplifies the writer's culture's weltanschauung, I have no problem calling it a folk-epic. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 130.132.173.196 (talk) 07:18, 1 December 2014 (UTC)

Should this page be cleaned up and unified a bit?

Terje Vigen

Should Terje Vigen be here? NorwegianMarcus 17:12, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

Prose epics

I've added in Le Morte d'Arthur. Some might argue that it is not strictly an epic, as it was written in prose rather than poetry; but I see other prose epics already on the list (such as the Mabinogion, or Njal's Saga), so I trust that's OK??

Drjamesaustin (talk) 02:25, 4 January 2011 (UTC)

American languages

I'm removing

Tunkashila, an American Indian epic in English by Gerald Hausman

from this section. English is not an indigenous American language, and there's no mention of Tunkashila in the Gerald Hausman article. DavidCh0 (talk) 12:52, 17 June 2020 (UTC)

Removed a post-Romantic epic

It seemed a bit weird that the list included L'Atlàntida, describing it as a Catalan literary epic, while it is just one out of many post-Romantic examples of epic literature written by a specific writer, i.e. Jacint Verdaguer... All the other epics on the list date from medieval times at the very latest and examples from the 19th century are based on oral tradition, e.g. the Kalevala which is the result of a guy touring the countryside and asking local people to sing their songs for his compilation. But this has nothing to do with a guy just sitting down and writing an epic poem somewhere in the 1880's. Then we would have to significantly expand the list... I hope people can agree on this one.