Musings on the Epic Genre

You can use the term epic for the whole genre, if you'd like, but there is a real difference in tone, style, and construction between the two kinds: oral and literary. Tolkien was consciously trying to re-create stories from older, more tribal times.

Oral epics tend to be the creations of more than one person and thus reflect the ethos of an ethnos, as it were, instead of the point of a view of a single conscious artist. They date from pre-literate societies, generally from Iron Age cultures, when we talk about the surviving epics of Europe, which we were, but not always: vide the Belisarius epics of the Balkans and the Iskander epics of the Hindu Kush. (Not that the Hindu Kush is in Europe, despite the Indo-European languages spoken there, but Iskander was originally a Greek, so what the hell.)

Oral epics tend to tell it like it is (or was, in the bards' lifetimes). Literary epics are attempting to re-create a generally idealized past. Literary epics are undertaken as works of art by highly educated poets, while the oral epic, even if shaped at some point by a single bard, as the Odyssey must have been, are composed at least partly as social records, preserving the memory of great men.

You can see the last in the Iliad -- the "catalogue of ships" was an important political document in the Greece of classical and Hellenistic times.

Changes of tone, such as comic relief, speak of conscious art to me. Tolkien, despite his desire to create something archaic with Lord of the Rings, was a conscious artist and thus doomed to fail at his self-appointed task. The "failure" at that does not mean that the books aren't great, of course. Besides, many of the passages in the Silmarillion do have the archaic feel he was trying for.