00:00 Professor Michael Clark discusses the nature of heroic epic poetry, highlighting its backward look to an earlier time and its exploration of the human condition through ambiguity and questioning.

04:36 Heroic literature explores the interstices between the need for young men to be sent out to die for their country and the darkness that can come upon them and those around them when that happens, and it has always questioned and challenged existing political and social structures.

09:21 The speaker was drawn to Irish narratives because they wanted to replace the old, culturally right-wing discourse with something that didn't lose the seriousness of reflections on mortality and the sorrows of the world that heroic epic literature brings, and doing comparative work teaches the lesson that civilizations are not multiple competing entities, but rather a single process of learning and acculturating.

13:28 The discovery of similarities between the flood story in the Epic of Gilgamesh and the story of Noah's flood in the Old Testament challenged the notion that European literature was separate from the literature of the ancient Near East, highlighting the intermingling and cross-fertilization of cultures in the ancient world.

17:53 The Greek world in the late Bronze Age was not connected to Northwestern Europe, and the rise of alphabetical literacy in Greece played a significant role in the development of mass literacy.

22:28 Interactions between different cultures and languages in the ancient world were likely more common than we have evidence for, and the voices of women and slaves have been lost more easily in subsequent traditions.

26:57 The use of scientific methods, such as analyzing ancient DNA and stable isotopes, allows for a better understanding of the movement and cultural assimilation in the past, which can lead to more complex and interesting stories about people and the emergence of unique speech communities.

31:35 The difficulty in understanding how the words and themes of the Homeric texts would have been perceived by the audience is due to the lack of additional texts and information from that time, but reading different poetic traditions alongside each other can provide valuable insights and reveal parallels, such as the theme of liminality between the divine and mortal in both Gilgamesh and the Iliad.

36:14 The similarities between the epic poems Gilgamesh and the Iliad, such as the parallel structures and shared imagery, suggest a deliberate and creative shaping of the stories by the authors, and this intertextuality can provide valuable insights into the literature and its connection to the broader world.

40:46 The literature of action becomes a literature of reflection, and the fact that epic poems like Gilgamesh and the Iliad became staples for educational study in subsequent centuries is a result of either pure literary excellence or coincidence.