What Makes Fantasy Epic?

This isn’t going to be a big post, but with The Gathering Of The Lost making the shortlist for the Gavid Gemmell Legend Award, I’ve been thinking a bit about what makes epic fantasy “epic.”

One suggestion made a few years back was that to qualify as “epic”, a fantasy had to be about large scale war — and certainly a lot of epic fantasies are. My own view is that large scale war is not a prerequisite for epic, but that to qualify a story does have to in some way encompass the grand sweep — very...