National epic

In medieval times Homer's Iliad was taken to be based on historical facts, and the Trojan War came to be considered as seminal in the genealogies of European monarchies.

According to the then-prevailing conception of history,[vague] empires were born and died in organic succession and correspondences existed between the past and the present.

Geoffrey of Monmouth's 12th-century classically inspired Historia Regum Britanniae, for example, fulfilled this function for the British or Welsh.

Just as kings longed to emulate great leaders of the past, Alexander or Caesar, it was a temptation for poets to become a new Homer or Virgil.

In 16th-century Portugal, Luís de Camões celebrated Portugal as a naval power in his Os Lusíadas while Pierre de Ronsard set out to write La Franciade, an epic meant to be the Gallic equivalent of Virgil's poem that also traced back France's ancestry to Trojan princes.

Karelian poem singing brothers Poavila and Triihvo Jamanen reciting traditional Finnish folk poetry, Russia, 1894.
Modern depiction of Vyasa narrating the Mahabharata to Ganesha at the Murudeshwara temple, Karnataka.
First page of Beowulf in Cotton Vitellius A. xv
Ján Hollý - author of the Slovak national epic poem Svatopluk .
Elias Lönnrot - author of the Finnish national epic poem Kalevala .
Dante Alighieri - author of the Divine Comedy .