Epics, the poems telling the deeds of great heroes, are probably the oldest kinds of poems out there. The Epic of Gilgamesh is at least as old as the earliest stories from the Bible, for example.
Many mediaeval poets modeled their poems after Virgil's Aeneid, the great story of how Rome was founded by Aeneas, the son of Venus by Anchises, a Trojan. Mediaeval people thought of the Roman Empire as a lost, but superior, civilization. Some people tried to write epics in the classical style as early as the tenth century. One example of a formal Latin epic from that period is Waltharius, about a young man fighting the Huns for his homeland's liberty.
The emulation of classical models intensified during the Renaissance. This was when Matteo Maria Boiardo and Lodovico Ariosto took the tales of Charlemagne's peers, and remodeled them as epics-Orlando Innamorato and Orlando Furioso. These two poems became models for emulation in their own right, especially Orlando Furioso.
When Edmund Spenser wrote his Faery Queen, it was with the goal of giving England an epic as good as Orlando Furioso, drawing, partially, from the stories of the Knights of the Round Table. Torquato Tasso aimed at telling a more moral story than those of Ariosto and Boiardo, filled as they were with courtly love, and recast the First Crusade in an epic mold as Gerusalemme Liberata. The exploits of Portuguese and Spanish explorers were fuel for more epics, of which the best-known is Luis Vaz de Camoens' Lusiads. The mock epic, in which the epic form is used in a satiric fashion, also had its roots in the Renaissance, with Morgante Maggiore, Luigi Pulci's irreverent version of Roland's adventures. Pulci stands apart from the others, in part because his work was clearly a satire.
Writing an full-length epic can take years. Like most people, poets have to earn a living. It was perfectly all right to issue sections of an epic as the poet had the opportunity. In fact, Spenser issued his work entirely in installments.
On the other hand, if you want to write something like an epic on some time-specific topic, you might want to consider the minor epic or epyllion. The minor epic first originated in the Hellenistic era, long after Homer lived. If epics are like novels, then epyllia are like short stories. They can be lighter in tone, sometimes drawing in elements of love poetry or humor. If you've heard that I've written epics, these epyllia are really what I've written, since they take a shorter time to produce.
Whether you're writing an epyllion or a full-length epic, the styles are similar. In the beginning, the poet has to declare his subject, and briefly summarize it. The poet then, typically, asks the Muses, or some other famous or legendary figures, to help him in his task. Often, this is where praise for the poet's patron first appears. Many poets were members of a royal or aristocratic household, and were expected to glorify its head through their verse. Others were trying to catch the attention of a patron. If the epic was set in the distant past, like Orlando Furioso, the poet might include, as a character, a supposed ancestor of the patron. If it was set in the near past, like the Lusiads, the patron was addressed directly to uphold his family's good name as the hero goes through his travails obeying the patron's ancestor's orders. Some typical patrons for the beginning poet in the SCA might be the subject of the epic, the baroness or baron, royalty, or the head of your household.
The plot often begins, not at the beginning, but in the middle of the action. Even Gerusalemme Liberata begins with the Christians on the road from Syria to Jerusalem, rather than in Europe, gathering together their things and heading out. The "chronologically earlier" parts of the story are brought up, sometimes piecemeal, sometimes all together, as the main characters have chances to bring them up. For instance, in the Lusiads, the main character, Vasco da Gama, makes several stops in East Africa before making his final push to India. The governor of one of the ports where the Portuguese resupply their armada asks him, naturally, for a few details about the trip, and Gama is happy to provide them. Vasco gets a chance to put his voyage in a larger perspective when he arrives in India, and is asked a similar question. However, this need not be the case. Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato starts at the beginning, but doesn't really end well, as Boiardo says that he can't write about love so long as war rages in Italy. Instead, Ariosto wrote the sequel to Boiardo's poem, Orlando Furioso, two generations later, though peace never came. It also keeps to a more or less chronological sequence.
I say more or less, because a Renaissance epic can be a rather sprawling work. Like the authors of the knightly romances of Arthur, in which several adventures can be going on at once, Renaissance epic poets would switch from the exploits of one character to the next, from one canto to another, sometimes with little warning.
While making the epic, keep in mind that an epic's main characters, even when clearly human figures in real life, like Godfrey of Bouillon, are heroes with a capital H. When one is fighting, he can rout a regiment, unless it is supported by another hero. Describing this does not ome easily. The solution, since the time of Homer, is to use what is called the Homeric simile. Our hero might be ferocious "like a bear awakened far too soon from his lair, rending and ripping". The regiment, meanwhile, might be "like autumn leaves blown and torn by the winter winds". The other hero, supporting the regiment, might be "like a lion roaring when he sees another entering his lands". Other major characters, like the ladies of the heroes' courts, get a similar treatment. Their hair is either like flames, gold, or ravens' wings, their figures the equal of Helen of Troy, and so on.
The supernatural, things or characters such as magic items, monsters, enchanters, and even up to the very hosts of Heaven, are major elements in most of these poems. Even in one which you might expect to have little of the otherworldly about it, Camoen's Lusiads, the ancient gods of Rome, affect events down below, manipulating the minds of men and the currents of the sea for their advantage, with Venus favoring the Portuguese and Bacchus supporting the Muslims in Africa and India. Tasso includes enchantresses and wizards in Gerusalemme Liberata, which, in other regards, follows the real events of the First Crusade. In many ways, the magic or the conflicts between the gods serves to move the plot along without getting things too complicated, like an inertialess drive in a science-fictional spacecraft.
Some epics also used allegory to drive home their points. The Faery Queen is probably the best example, as the knights face off against figures representing various vices and enemies of England or Protestantism, and rescue others who represent virtues or the friends of the nation or faith.
Virgil's Aeneid, the model for most mediaeval epics, was written in Latin hexameters. Rhyme was not considered important in classical poetry. The Aeneid was separated into libri, or books. Renaissance epic poets retained the custom of dividing up the poem into books. They also further subivided books into cantos, and cantos into stanzas. However, the epics of Renaissance England, Portugal, and Italy used the vernaculars of those lands.
While Portuguese and Italian are direct descendants of Latin, the customs of poetry shifted in the centuries since the fall of Rome. By the fifteenth century, epic poems in those languages were written in ottava rima. Ottava rima has a rhyme scheme of ABABABCC. In Romance languages, a stanza of ottava rima has ten syllables per line. In English, it has eleven syllables per line.
Renaissance English translators of Romance language epics tried to use ottava rima in their productions. A few Tudor poets, like Surrey and Wyatt, even tried to use it in original poems. It is harder for an English poet to use, because our language does not have as many terminal vowels, which make for easy rhymes. As a result, the poem can be a grammatical mess, since words often are taken out of order to preserve the rhyme scheme.
Edmund Spenser was aware of these problems with English verse in ottava rima, as his intent in writing The Faery Queen was to produce an epic as good as Ariosto's Orlando Furioso. Spenser would have faced presure upon him to write his epic in ottava rima, especially since his friends from his college days at Cambridge were classicists, who admired Italian and Latin poetry. However, he blazed his own trail and developed a stanza just for English epics, called the Spenserian stanza. It is nine lines long, in iambic pentameter, with a rhyme scheme of ABABBABACC. Since his is the only Renaissance epic written in English, and not a translation from another language, it is my opinion that Spenserian stanzas are the appropriate way to go for someone writing a similar poem.
Poetry, like drama, has to be heard in order to be appreciated. The epic is no exception. There are constant mentions of poetic recitations in letters and diaries of the Renaissance, often by the poet himself in the presence of his patron and the rest of the court.
Doing it yourself is the best option. Only you know exactly how the poem ought to sound. However, hiring a reader (like, say, a herald) who has a good speaking voice and who is at ease with putting on a show is a natural choice if you are easily spooked on stage, or have other reasons for not reciting it yourself. Spenser lived in Ireland while he was writing The Faery Queen, and sent it, bit by bit, to London, where it would be published and recited by others.
If this little piece of mine has inspired somebody to go out and write an epic, I will have succeeded beyond my hopes. In order to put this talk together, I read the epics I named, plus several critical studies.
Epics
Critical Works
The introductions of the epics usually are useful in this
regard, but commentaries on the epics abound. These are a few
which I used.