'' in Cotton Vitellius A. xv – author of the Slovak national epic poem
Svatopluk. – author of the Finnish national epic poem
Kalevala. – author of the
Divine Comedy. In medieval times Homer's
Iliad was taken to be based on historical facts, and the
Trojan War came to be considered as seminal in the genealogies of European monarchies. Virgil's
Aeneid was taken to be the Roman equivalent of the
Iliad, starting from the Fall of Troy and leading up to the birth of the young Roman nation. According to the then-prevailing conception of history, empires were born and died in organic succession and correspondences existed between the past and the present.
Geoffrey of Monmouth's 12th-century classically inspired
Historia Regum Britanniae, for example, fulfilled this function for the
British or
Welsh. Just as kings longed to emulate great leaders of the past, Alexander or Caesar, it was a temptation for poets to become a new Homer or Virgil. In 16th-century Portugal,
Luís de Camões celebrated Portugal as a naval power in his
Os Lusíadas while
Pierre de Ronsard set out to write
La Franciade, an epic meant to be the Gallic equivalent of Virgil's poem that also traced back France's ancestry to Trojan princes. The emergence of a national
ethos, however, preceded the coining of the phrase
national epic, which seems to originate with
Romantic nationalism. Where no obvious national epic existed, the "Romantic spirit" was motivated to fill it. An early example of poetry that was invented to fill a perceived gap in "national" myth is
Ossian, the narrator and supposed author of a cycle of poems by
James Macpherson, which Macpherson claimed to have translated from ancient sources in
Scottish Gaelic. However, many national epics (including Macpherson's
Ossian) antedate 19th-century romanticism. Adam Mickiewicz's
Pan Tadeusz (1834) is often considered the last epic poem in European literature. Since the early 20th century, the phrase has no longer necessarily applied to an epic poem, and occurs to describe a literary work that readers and critics agree is emblematical of the literature of a nation, without necessarily including details from that nation's historical background. In this context the phrase has definitely positive connotations, as for example in
James Joyce's
Ulysses where it is suggested
Don Quixote is Spain's national epic while Ireland's remains as yet unwritten: They remind one of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Our national epic has yet to be written, Dr Sigerson says. Moore is the man for it. A knight of the rueful countenance here in Dublin. ==See also==