Epics

Long narrative poems that a tradition treats as authoritative rather than as its national literature. The Mahabharata and the Ramayana are recited, expounded and lived by in a way no account of their plots reaches, and the Kumulipo is a genealogical chant that carries Hawaiian descent back to the origin of the world. Epics without that standing, from Gilgamesh and the Iliad to Beowulf and the Kalevala, are gathered under Other Writings instead. The line between the two groups is drawn by reception, not by form, and it is the harder of the two judgments.