Personally and in order...

The Bible of Fantasy has to be:

1: Lord of the Rings

Then:

2: Malazan Book of the Fallen

Followed by

3: RiftWar Saga

I don't know really. I've read all the Tolkien stuff (Sillmarillion and those others, too), but the only one of his books I really enjoyed was The Hobbit. The movies are great, though.

How about the Amber series, by Zalazny?

First a comment...

Eddings and Goodkind are for children.  They are crap, crapola, and craptastic...

If you must read Eddings, pick any of his series and your read them all... change bad guy and locations... the rest is identical...

For my favorite...  George R. Martin

The Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind. The author Robert Jordan pased away in June of this year with the final volume not yet completed, another author, (I don't rember his name has taken up the task to complete the book.)

I don't like to join trash-talking that often, but I tried hard to get into the Sword of Truth and just couldn't stand how much, for me, it read like a bad TV series from the old WB. If you're at all picky about lovely prose, interesting characters, or attempts at novel twists for the fantasy genre, I don't think Eddings should be on your list. Although I suppose I should admit that I put in my painful reading time at the recommendation of a friend who loves a good table-based RPG but also plays the computer-based attempts at same. And he's a very quick reader. He also gave my mother and me our first copy of Eye of the World.

Which brings me back to the very verbose Robert Jordan and the real question for this thread: just what makes a novel (or series) deserve the adjective "epic?"

For me, the answer might almost be put best in terms I learned for 9th-grade book reports--or maybe by bastardizing those terms a little bit. IMO, if a fantasy story is epic, that means that the *setting* is a major character. You can see small analogs of this in other genres such as TV cop dramas--Baltimore is a major part of The Wire. This emphasis on setting is why Tolkien probably still tops the charts for most folks interested in the genre, and why Robert Jordan is beside or above him for many of those folks. Word count is a secondary issue (and as a Jordan apologist, I have some Pattern-based arguments for why extensive, repetitive talk about doilies and in-group feuds are *not* wasted pages).

P.S. To Eddings fans: Your taste is your taste, and it needs no defense unless you've been rash enough to bring the subject up in a lit class or you get paid to write reviews. I'm very glad to find writers I dislike because that means people are trying different things, which increases the chances of someone writing something I didn't even know that I wanted to read.

Feist's Riftwar Saga is the top of my list.  Tolkein and Jordan are alright, but Riftwar was the best for me.  I like how the various series take on different perspectives and later generations in the same universe.  The 'Empire' series Feist co-wrote with Janny Wurts takes place entirely druing the first 2 (or 1) book of the orignal Riftwar series, but from the other side.

I also have been a big fan of David Drake, mostly sci-fi, but his Lord of the Isles fantasy series is also pretty good.

Wise and Hickman's Deathgate cycle is also quite interesting with a completely different take on the fantasy epic.

William Forstchen's Lost Regiment series is not really traditional 'fantasy', more like historical fiction/sci-fi/fantasy combined, but a very good read if you can find it.  Lots of large scale war that is always desperately won in the 11th hour.  A Union regiment from the civil war gets transported to another world, where they have to fight giant aliens similar to a Mongol Horde that eat humans.

I checked the entry "Epic fantasy" in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, and the definition and comments are very interesting:

"An epic is a long narrative poem which tells large tales, often incorporating a mixture of legend, myth and folk history, and featuring heroes whose acts have significance transcending their own individual happiness or woe. The classic epic tells the story of the founding or triumph of a a folk or nation."

Examples: Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Beowulf.

More pertinent for this discussion is the question of contemporary prose epic fiction (fantasy). The examples given are: Morris, E.R. Eddison, Tolkien, and Donaldson. (At least I got three on my list! )

The article goes on to state that "any fantasy tale written to a large scale which deals with the founding or definitive and lasting defence of a Land may fairly be called an Epic Fantasy."

"Unfortunately, the term has been increasingly used by publishers to describe Heroic Fantasies that extend over several volumes, and has thus lost its usefulness."  - So, there we go with Robert Jordan again ...! 

Does the Cryptonomican cause raving lunacy shading into violent madness too? I had assumed it was just the Necronomican and Snow Crash, but maybe Neal Stephenson just has that effect when he writes fiction - {G}.

Either that or possibly he *is* the mad arab, and actually wrote all three!

Jonnan

Whoa no ones mentioned the elizabeth moon series "Deed of paksenarrion" yet.

While I couldn't care less for "lovely prose", I really don't know what you're getting at with "interesting characters" or "attempts at novel twists"; In both these departments, Eddings is god. At least compared to Tolkien; "This is Frodo. He's a hobbit. He's got a ring. And that guy over there, he's evil, and wants the ring."

. Did you read Lord of the rings or did you just saw the films?

I tried. I honestly really tried, but I just couldn't. It was just impossible. I couldn't stand it.