Meredith Mansfield, Author

I mostly want to share some of my thoughts about reader expectations of epic fantasy. This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while.

It’s probably best to start by defining what epic fantasy is—and what it’s not. Epic fantasy is defined by the reason the characters attempt whatever it is they’re trying to do and the stakes if they fail. As with the Hero’s (or Warrior’s) Journey, the characters in an epic fantasy set out to accomplish something that will be of benefit to more than just themselves. Frodo goes to save Middle Earth from enslavement by Sauron, for example. (There’s a reason why epic fantasy usually has at least on character who is also on a Hero’s (or Warrior’s) Journey.) And the stakes, if they fail, are greater than just the chance that the hero may die. The stakes in LORD OF THE RINGS are all of the world, including Frodo’s beloved Shire, being cruelly enslaved.

This is what differentiates epic fantasy from its first cousin, sword and sorcery. The two sub-genres are superficially similar. Both tend to be second world fantasies and very often involve a quest. But sword and sorcery is much more about some personal gain for the characters—adventure, treasure, or revenge, most often. And the stakes are usually the risk that a character may die in pursuit of that goal. For sword and sorcery, that’s the ultimate failure. Whereas, in epic fantasy, a character’s death is not a failure so long as it helps to achieve the larger goal.

Sword and sorcery stories are usually smaller in scale to match the smaller goals and stakes, though, of course, the characters may have more than one adventure over the course of a series, like Conan the Barbarian, to name only one classic example. By contrast, epic fantasies have a greater tendency to be . . . well, epically long. The greater stakes can support a bigger—longer—story.

But all of that is not what really defines reader expectations of epic fantasy. That’s more defined by the story that really popularized the sub-genre: LORD OF THE RINGS. More on that in my next post.