Like others have mentioned, Tolkien (start from the Hobbit, don't just straight into the deep end with LOTR), and Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series are both excellent, but there's other stuff that's closer to your tastes imho. If you liked Abercrombie for instance you could check out some of Pratchett's books, similar sense of humour and same gift for writing good, funny dialogue. Diehard fantasy fans forget about him because he's so mainstream but he's still a brilliant writer, even though I prefer his early stuff myself, before he started repeating himself so much.
You might also like Bakker's books. Read his first one (The Darkness That Comes Before) around the same time that I got into Abercrombie, and it hooked me. He's not as amusing a writer as Abercrombie but his books are very deep, very dark, and very, very epic. Both Bakker and Abercrombie subvert the standard Tolkien fantasy epic framework, but if Abercrombie turns Obi Wan into Darth Vader, then (without wanting to spoil too much), Bakker turns Aragorn into Sauron, and suggests that Sauron himself is just a petty tyrant in an insignificant world, whose soul will be a midnight snack for the dark abyssal powers who dwell in the interstellar void outside it!
So they both make the epic seem petty and prosaic, but in very different ways.
Maybe you could also try a bit of the classics, like Lovecraft and Howard? Especially Howard's Conan stories. They're not deep and they're not clever but he's got an awesome gift for action and vivid description which makes them a very entertaining read!
Also you can't not try a bit of Neil Gaiman and China Mieville, neither of them is "standard" fantasy but they write weird, fantastic stories and are 2 of the best writers alive today.
