Time was (in the 80s, maybe 90s?), I think what most writers, readers, publishers, booksellers basically had in mind when they used the word ‘epic’ was not much more than scale. Big word counts, big casts, big (secondary) worlds, big threats. There was plenty of more sophisticated thinking about it going on, but in commercial, practical terms, that’s all that was functionally meant, I’d have thought.

Was it trying to borrow a sense of consequence and resonance from ancient/old prose and poetic ‘epics’ by associating itself with the word? Sure. But quite a few of those ancient mythic iterations of the epic don’t centre upon existential or near-existential threats to worlds, civilizations, races, cultures or philosophies in the way I think epic fantasy has, and often still does. That’s a particular more-or-less defining component of ‘epic’ that the sub-genre settled on for itself, if you ask me, partly because LotR is so deeply embedded in its roots I guess.

(I think I could maybe also make a case that epic fantasy has in recent years been more interested in, putting it very crudely, turning legends into history than history into legends, and therefore actually more inclined to decode and demystify (debase?) myths than aspire to their status, but that’s a whole other debate).

That so much epic fantasy was/is conservative (or restorative) is kind of cooked into the meal. If one of the key ingredients was change that posed an existential threat, overcoming or reversing that threatened change is pretty predictable as a dominant trope of the sub-genre in its early years. There was an inherent tendency to an internal conservatism.

As Paul says above, it’s a somewhat different thing to debate whether epic fantasy is, or has so far been, conservative in the wider, politicised sense we might use the term when considering the books as cultural artefacts in the real world.

The imagined societies and worlds within those books have undoubtedly sometimes – and sometimes uncritically – reflected the contemporary assumptions (conscious or otherwise) about cultures, privilege, hierarchies, social order etc etc held by their authors and readers. That, or they’re based on visions of real-world historical societies seen through the lens of past or current assumptions.

It’s easy, and a bit unsettling, for them to therefore look not only internally but also externally conservative. I’m pretty sure they’re not the same thing, because as a thought experiment I can imagine an epic fantasy that was deeply conservative in an internal, narrative sense, while at the same time being wildly non-conservative in the wider, external sense. I’ve got to admit, I’ve not read enough to think of an absolute slam-dunk of an example that really nails the two extremes off the top of my head, but they must be out there somewhere?

What I really think, though, is that the taxonomy and perceptions of secondary world fantasy has not yet caught up with the much greater variety of styles, tones, viewpoints, ambitions that – as you point out in the article – new writers have gradually introduced, especially in the last decade or so. Turns out ‘epic fantasy’ doesn’t have to be conservative, doesn’t have to involve existential threats, maybe doesn’t even have to be epic at all.

Heroic (or antiheroic) fantasy only overlaps with epic to the extent that the protagonist is identified with Authority or its nemesis. Conan being king might qualify The Hour of the Dragon as epic, but it’s quite a stretch. And most Conan stories are anything but epic. Same with Fafhrd/Grey Mouser, Corson/Nyctasia, Jirel of Joiry, and Cugel the Clever.

A definition of conservative, in this context, is also needed. One type of political conservatism presents its narratives in terms that are not unlike those of fantastic stories where Authority is at risk, and stands or falls most often based on the violent actions of competing factions. That may be a subliminal presence for readers of epic fantasy, made more overt when the text seems to privilege racist or sexist stereotypes. More prevalent is the idea that epic fantasy doesn’t imagine any new social or political structures or ways for people to interact, that it just rehashes old forms of Authority, old social hierarchies, and conventional if not grotesquely dated social roles. So it’s conservative in the sense of unimaginative, not open to new ideas, lacking in daring.

I have a hard time seeing epic fantasy as dramatically more guilty of conservatism in either the political or literary sense than much of science fiction. Violent overthrow of a tyrannical Authority or violent defense of a supposedly worthy Authority is also a common occurrence in science fiction works, with military SF being a particular bastion, and most science fiction imagines a future in which technology is far advanced but social relations are much the same as whatever decade the book was written in, to the extent of having books set 300 years from now where people are still heavy into ’80s pop music or ’50s Beat poetry. Of course the more contemporary the writing, the more natural it seems to us that the future world would be like NOW, rather than like Tudor England or ’50s America. Now always threatens to become the eternal present, to the detriment of our imaginative faculties. Now it seems obvious that democracy is more enlightened than monarchy, but it’s not at all unlikely that both will be considered equally reprehensible at some future date. Would your 24th century counterpart really root for the government of McCarthy era America against the Duchy of Grand Fenwick, simply because the latter was a fossilized aristocracy?