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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dr. Strangemonkey" data-source="post: 2277739" data-attributes="member: 6533">yeah, let me see if I can clarify.  By the time you reach the level of moral narrative necessary to construct an epic a conflict between good and evil can only be a subset of what's going on.Lord of the Rings can really have concrete extrapolations of good and evil duking it out, though I'm not really certain that's what's going on there but let's accept it and move on, but even in Milton, the most fantastic epic, the fight between good and evil is only one part of the creation story of Hell and the fall of man.  Evil has to be personified and explored in a way that Fantasy doesn't really have to do.And in the Divine Comedy good and evil aren't really fighting they're just different point on a continuum where good has definitively won and is trying to structure evil into the new order.In both cases it's the structuring that's important, in the Lord of the Rings there's still a lot of structuring going on but it's not the action is a far more important focus of the narrative.It's like the difference between novels and Mennippean satires.  Novels are narrower in the sense that they are more constructed and have a more focused scope, but I'm not arguing that Moby Dick is anything less than sprawling just that it's not got the invested breadth that Gulliver's Travels has to have.</blockquote>