Life & Wisdom Quote by Lascelles Abercrombie

Gatekeeping rarely announces itself as such; it prefers taxonomy. Abercrombie’s line has the cool, professorial snap of a poet-critic drawing a border in pencil and then pretending it’s ink. “If epic poetry is a definite species” is the tell: he’s conceding, almost politely, that the category might be unstable, then proceeding as if it’s sturdy enough to exclude someone. The sagas, in this framing, become the inconvenient cousin at the formal dinner - undeniably related to heroic narrative, undeniably influential, but not invited to sit at “epic’s” high table.

The intent is less about disparaging sagas than about protecting a particular idea of epic: shaped, authored, architected. Early 20th-century British criticism, steeped in classical models and the prestige of Homer and Virgil, often treated “epic” as a craft form with recognizable engineering: elevated style, unified design, an author’s controlling intelligence. Sagas are messier: accretive, communal, more like a long memory than a single monument. They thrive on episode, genealogy, legal quarrel, the everyday rubbing against the heroic. That hybridity is exactly what makes them hard to file and easy to dismiss.

The subtext is anxiety about legitimacy. If sagas count, then epic stops being a curated museum wing and starts looking like a folk archive. Abercrombie’s sentence performs a cultural sorting operation: literature as “species,” tradition as natural history, and the critic as taxonomist. It’s a neat move, rhetorically, because it sounds objective while quietly enforcing a hierarchy of taste and origin.