ABOVE ALL, AN EPIC IS BIG. It is about big things — death, courage, honour, war, shame, vengeance. It is about large and public matters — the fate of a nation, the return of a king, the success of an army, the origin of a people. Its principal characters are larger than human beings, and perhaps simpler too: they are heroes. The preservation of an epic is a matter not of private dilettantism but of national importance. It is less precious than literature, but more valuable.

An epic is independent of the identity of its author. Oh, someone eventually transcribes an oft-told tale, sometimes in a highly wrought style, sometimes as a masterpiece of poetry, sometimes in a rough and clumsy version full of repetition or jumbled with contradictions or riddled with gaps; and sometimes a name is attached to it and sometimes that name is, like Homer’s, meaningless, because who composed The Iliad? Homer. Who was Homer? He who composed The Iliad. Perhaps.

And sometimes there is no name at all: Gilgamesh does not even have a Homer.

These days, the author is everything: the book tours, the media profiles, the online interviews, the literary festivals, the signing sessions, the panel discussions promoted by cultural organisations — they could all take place just as happily in the absence of the literary work altogether, because the author as celebrity is all that matters.

But with a great tale of the epic kind, all we need to do is accept the work of the scribe with gratitude, and edit the scattered remains as well as we can; the absence of an author and all the attendant personal appear- ances and lifestyle features and PR ballyhoo is wonderfully clarifying, like the wind from the desert that smells of nothing.

Perhaps the epic is, in some ways, the very opposite of the novel, which began on the page and really came into its own in the era of printing, as a domestic romance enjoyed most happily in solitude and in silence. The oldest epics have something of the declamatory about them: they are more suitably experienced through the ear, perhaps, and in company, than through the eye and in private.

Like theatre, epic is an arena for the hero. Great heroes are uncomfortable in the novel, where the point of view is too close, too familiar, and the lens has exactly the right focal length to pick up the little flaws, the “spots of commonness”, in George Eliot’s phrase. No man is a hero to his novelist. A hero has flaws, to be sure, but they are not on a domestic scale. To see heroes in the frame that best fits the greatness of their nature and their actions, we need to be at some distance from them.

Epic heroes seem to be at some distance from themselves. This realisation lies behind the crazy and yet tantalisingly rich idea of Julian Jaynes who, in his book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Allen Lane, 1976), puts forward the bizarre suggestion that human beings became conscious in the modern sense only during the past 4,000 years; that until then they heard the promptings of conscience, or temptation, or inspiration, as the voices of gods, coming apparently from elsewhere, with no sense that their own minds were responsible.

He uses the instance of Achilles in The Iliad, experiencing his reluctance to strike Agamemnon as the goddess Athena seizing his golden hair and pulling him back.

Similarly, Jane Smiley, talking of the Icelandic sagas, points out that “they seem far removed from modern literary subjectivity, and yet the gossip and the comments of other characters supply a practical and readily understandable psychological context. Characters speak up, they say what they want and what their intentions are. Other characters disagree with them and judge them. The saga writer sometimes remarks upon public opinion concerning them. The result is that the sagas are psychologically complex and yet economical in their analysis.” (introduction to The Sagas of Icelanders, Viking, 2000).

The human interactions in epic stories are out in the open, where all can see them, with the fresh air blowing through them; there is nothing enclosed, nothing stale, nothing stuffy.

Finally, the epic vision is tragic. Jasper Griffin, discussing a translation of Gilgamesh in The New York Review of Books, recently remarked: “There is no happy ending, even for mighty heroes who are close to the gods . . . This is the true epic vision . . . An older wisdom, and a truer poetry, sees that the highest nobility and the deepest truth are inseparable, in the end, from failure — however heroic — from defeat, and from death.”

So Beowulf dies in the moment of his triumph against the dragon, and King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table go down to defeat in their final battle, and as Hjalti says in Sagas and Myths of the Norsemen in the Penguin collection, “it is not possible to bend fate, nor can one stand against nature”.

Odysseus, safely returned home at last after his 20 years of battle and wandering, will not stay in his cleansed and peaceful palace for good; a time will come when he will want to move on again, although he knows that, as Tennyson has him say, “death closes all”. even Sindbad, that peerless traveller in the realms of wonder, has to succumb in the end, when “there came to him the Spoiler of worldly mansions, the Dark Steward of the graveyard; the Shadow which dissolves the bonds of friendship and ends alike all joys and all sorrows”.

The epic is not a place where anyone lives happily ever after; it obeys a mightier realism than that.

But everything I can say about the epic is instantly and effortlessly contradicted by a list such as this, so rich and so varied. Stories are always wiser than their commentators, as Isaac Bashevis Singer said. In the 60th anniversary year of the first Penguin Classic, it is wonderful to see the old stories as vigorous and as fresh as they ever were.