My two favorites are listed already.

Dragonlance does count as epic as far as I know. The whole series spans many books and there is a lot of offshoots to dig throught hat are directly connected to the main story.

Has anyone read the Shannara series? I've only read one and it didn't make much sense to me. The Wheel of Time looks fun enough.

George R R Martin's Dragonbone chair series.

Of course, hardly anything comes close to the Leabhar Gabala (the Book of Conquests) and the Tain Bo Cualngé, the Eddas or the Mahabharata...

Aren`t these two different things? The Dragenbone chair series is from Tad Williams (His Shadowmarch series is good, too!) And George R.R.Martin is famous for his Song of Ice and Fire (Which is really awesome!!! My favourite!). HBO has the rights for Song of Ice and Fire  and is working on a pilot movie!!! Juhuuu!

I'd second Earthsea and Discworld.

Wheel of Time I'm not so keen on: it has some interesting ideas, but repeated and padded out too much. Make too many characters, give each of them one personality trait, one annoying quirk or habit, and one special power. Run through all possible combination in which they might interact to fill 13 books of sodding Naieve tugging her stupid braid. Not epic, relentlessly mundane.

The Legend of Zelda video game series.

Gotta say the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan is epic.

Technically speaking, although that's very theoretical, Star Wars is fantasy, albeit in a futuristic setting. Science Fiction would require a stronger focus on the pretense that the universe is science-driven instead of being, as it's presented, magic (force)-driven.Fantasy does not necessarily mean "medieval fantasy", imho.

But back to topic: I'd go with A Song of Ice and Fire on all counts.

Let's ignore the massive invasion by the Seanchan, the whole good and evil thing, the bloody (literally more often than not) politics, the general mind-crushing despair that accompanies most characters. It has more than enough wholescale war, and the evolution of many of the characters. Infact, I don't know wtf your complaining about, because he writes from so many different PoVs that you almost never see each individual character, he went an entire book without writing anything from the main protagonist, etc.

Hey man, calm down! He was just stating his oppinion and not attacking you... IMHO the beginning of WOT is very cool, the middle is very weak (even boring to me...) and the last published book is very good again. Looking forward to the conclusion although the author has died in the meantime... I think his son is finishing it, is that right?

Well I must confess I got bogged down at book 8 and eventually stopped. So, book 1 was good enough to make me want to attempt to read the series to it's conclusion, despite the blatant Lord of the Rings parallels. I obviously don't know if the conclusion is any good or not, but the bulk of the series is pretty dire. He does keep introducing new ideas, but spreads them too thin, in some cases embarrassingly repeating himself verbatim. The characters are also thin: they level up too fast, and, as I mentioned before, are distinguished by each having a special power and an annoying habit or catch phrase. *LOLCHRIST smoothes clothing*

And yeah, the Dune thing, let's call it a reference. The Aes Sedai are to Wise Women as the Bene Gessariat are to Reverend Mothers.

Although I would argue that Dune is also a series that starts very well and degenerates into self-indulgent tosh.

Don't you mean 'BGs are to Honored Matres'?

I don't like rank-ordered lists, but I love hearing a few favorites named now and then. I've enjoyed many of the titles folks mentioned above, and a couple are on my list but not in my local library yet.

I'm kind of surprised no one's mentioned Zelazny's Amber novels yet. But then I hadn't thought about them in a good while myself. Back when the series was just the Corwin books, I saw a few different variations on a deck of Trumps for D&D-type games. I wonder how hard teleportation magic will be in Elemental, or if it'll even be possible.