ABSTRACT
Four fallacies recur in the existing scholarship on heroic narrative poetry, otherwise known as the epic. The first is that the epic, indeed all heroic poetry, flourishes only in centralized, monarchical societies and that it is essentially an aristocratic genre of traditional poetry featuring mainly royalty and their aristocratic courtiers and is sustained by the patronage of royal courts. The second is that the epic is invariably a monumental narrative of great length, composed in elevated style by means of formulas or recurrent metrical units that serve more as aide-mémoire, filling lines and half-lines in the essentially mechanical process of oral-formulaic composition in performance rather than as semantic units creating culture-specific images of things or fully individuated human personalities. From this fetishization of verse, or metrical composition, and of length, or the elevated style in the conception of the epic, emerge the third and fourth fallacies, namely, that the epic is invariably a verse or metrical composition and that heroic narrative poems of brief compass, the so-called epic songs or heroic lays manifested in, for example, the Eddie lays of northern Europe and the briefer heroic songs of pre-Homeric Myceanean antiquity and elsewhere, are not epics per se but epics in formation, ancestors of the epic, or epic fragments. Until very recently, the epic has been ruled out of existence in the storytelling traditions of many peoples of the world, especially in Africa, because of these fallacies. Chief among those whose heritage of epic poetry has been either misunderstood or denied are nonaristocratic and traditionally republican people, such as the 25 million Igbo people of southeastern Nigeria. This article discusses the types of heroic narrative poetry that have been found to exist in Igbo culture and that, on the basis of the most universal and inalienable features of the genre, cannot but be recognized as folk epics. The admission of these forms as epics will no doubt have important implications for the comparative understanding of the nature of the genre and its future definition.
