ILLUSTRATIONS

Odin Bids Farewell to Brunhild before He Surrounds Her by a
Barrier of Fire (Frontispiece)
From the painting by Th.  Pixis

Oedipus Solving the Sphinx’s Riddle
From the painting by Ingres

Achilles Disguised as a Girl Testing the Sword in Ulysses’ Pack
From the painting by Battoni

Circe and Ulysses’ Companions Turned into Swine
By L. Chalon

Venus Meeting Aeneas and Achates Near Carthage
From the painting by Cortona

Roland at Roncevaux
From the painting by L.F.  Guesnet

The Palace Where Inez de Castro Lived and was Murdered

Dante Interviewing Hugues Capet
From an illustration by R. Galli

Hermione Finds Tancred Wounded
From the painting by Nicolas Poussin

The Body of Elaine on its Way to King Arthur’s Palace
By Gustave Dora

Una and the Red Cross Knight
From the painting by George Frederick Watts

The Heralds Summon Lucifer’s Host to a Council at Pandemonium
By Gustave Dore

The Dead Sigfried Rome Back to Worms
From the painting by Th.  Pixis

St. John the Evangelist at Patmos Writing the Apocalypse
From the painting by Correggio

Sita Soothing Rama to Sleep
From a Calcutta print

The Monk Breaks into the Robbers’ House to Rescue White Aster
From a Japanese print

“It is in this vast, dim region of myth and legend the sources of the literature of modern times are hidden; and it is only by returning to them, by constant remembrance that they drain a vast region of vital human experience, that the origin and early direction of that literature can be recalled.”—­Hamilton Wright Mabie.

FOREWORD

Derived from the Greek epos, a saying or oracle, the term “epic” is generally given to some form of heroic narrative wherein tragedy, comedy, lyric, dirge, and idyl are skilfully blended to form an immortal work.

“Mythology, which was the interpretation of nature, and legend, which is the idealization of history,” are the main elements of the epic.  Being the “living history of the people,” an epic should have “the breadth and volume of a river.”  All epics have therefore generally been “the first-fruits of the earliest experience of nature and life on the part of imaginative races”; and the real poet has been, as a rule, the race itself.

There are almost as many definitions of an epic and rules for its composition as there are nations and poets.  For that reason, instead of selecting only such works as in the writer’s opinion can justly claim the title of epic, each nation’s verdict has been accepted, without question, in regard to its national work of this class, be it in verse or prose.