First, Lewis Carroll established his unique brand of fantasy.
Second, Tolkien established the subgenre of high fantasy.
Now and then, authors have attempted to merge the two subgenres, with little success.
The main challenge is Wonderland. It is easier to imitate Tolkien than it is to imitate Carroll.
Both subgenres involve wonder, but Carroll’s is a purer wonder (hence the world name.) The epic scale of Tolkien’s work generates wonder, but that wonder is a smaller part of the overall experience, only generated through safer and more resilient means.
Because of that, Tolkien created a straight forward and solid template. Middle Earth is a very tangible, tactile world. It is comprehensible.
In contrast, Wonderland relies on incomprehension. Similar to Lovecraft’s works, the wonder of Wonderland is lost if you try to reach out and touch it.
So before an author can even try to marry the two subgenres, the problem of how to make Wonderland corporeal must first be solved, something Wonderland imitators rarely even try.
One of the closest successes I have seen is American McGee’s Alice games. They partially succeed in achieving Epic Wonderland. But part of the way they achieve that is scaling back the epic slider. They are more Wonderland than epic.
One of the main epic omissions is allies. Similar to the ID games McGee worked on prior to Alice, the Alice games are mostly one protagonist fighting a world of evil. It is not a war with two forces.
The games flirt with being a war and giving Alice allies, but those are usually some of their weakest points. The noble Griffin feels boring and out-of-place in the first game.
The Cheshire cat and White rabbit work better as allies because they are barely allies. The former is antagonistic and the latter is indifferent. And they rarely interact with the environment. The Cheshire cat in particular is mostly a ghost.
<aside> 💡 The Raven in Marloth plays a similar role to Alice’s Cheshire cat.
I never thought of it before, but that may have been a subconscious influence for me.
</aside>
The second game converts the Mad Hatter from a enemy into an ally, and while it sort of works, he still loses a lot of his mystique in the process. McGee doesn’t seem to know how to frame allies and make them endearing.
While the Alice games may not be wars between two factions, the games are battles, and that is one of the main aspects where they achieve Epic Wonderland. Most other narratives which attempt to marry Wonderland with combat usually lose the wonder.