ABSTRACT
The perennial questions of who we are, of how we relate to the divine and to one another, are as ancient as literature itself. They are also the particular concerns of epic—typically, a long narrative poem that engages a “serious subject,” written in an elevated style. Epic focuses on an individual but describes a world. It reflects a culture’s origins and projects its destiny, giving definitive form to its vital mythology. In the beginning the gods loom large; so, too, does a sense of fate or destiny, of forces that act upon the hero, for good or for ill.
