The Role of Side Characters in Epic Fantasy

In epic fantasy, you can have lots of people just wandering around as secondary characters are tertiary or even spear carriers. The difference between watching Gimli in Lord of the Rings and then watching the enormous cast of dwarves in the Hobbit is that they all have different personalities to them. You know, I've got a really cool actual historical example of this phenomenon. When European settlers found the island of Patagonia, the first person they met was enormous. They went back to England and said, we found an island full of giants.