flyting

The tradition & historical record

Flyting or fliting (Classical Gaelic: immarbág, Irish: iomarbháigh, lit. "counter-boasting") is a contest consisting of the exchange of insults between two parties, often conducted in verse. ¹

The word flyting comes from the Old English verb flītan meaning 'to quarrel', made into a gerund with the suffix -ing. Attested from around 1200 in the general sense of a verbal quarrel, it is first found as a technical literary term in Scotland in the sixteenth century. The first written Scots example is William Dunbar, The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie, written in the late fifteenth century. ¹

Flyting is a ritual, poetic exchange of insults practiced mainly between the 5th and 16th centuries. Examples of flyting are found throughout Scots, Ancient, Medieval and Modern Celtic, Old English, Middle English and Norse literature involving both historical and mythological figures. The exchanges would become extremely provocative, often involving accusations of cowardice or sexual perversion. Norse literature contains stories of the gods flyting. For example, in Lokasenna the god Loki insults the other gods in the hall of Ægir. In the poem Hárbarðsljóð, Hárbarðr (generally considered to be Odin in disguise) engages in flyting with Thor. In the confrontation of Beowulf and Unferð in the poem Beowulf, flytings were used as either a prelude to battle or as a form of combat in their own right. In Anglo-Saxon England, flyting would take place in a feasting hall. The winner would be decided by the reactions of those watching the exchange. The winner would drink a large cup of beer or mead in victory, then invite the loser to drink as well. The 13th-century poem The Owl and the Nightingale and Geoffrey Chaucer's Parlement of Foules contain elements of flyting. Flyting became public entertainment in Scotland in the 15th and 16th centuries, when makars would engage in verbal contests of provocative, often sexual and scatological but highly poetic abuse. Flyting was permitted despite the fact that the penalty for profanities in public was a fine of 20 shillings (over £300 in 2026 prices) for a lord, or a whipping for a servant. James IV and James V encouraged "court flyting" between poets for their entertainment and occasionally engaged with them. ¹

Hilary Mackie has detected in the Iliad a consistent differentiation between representations in Greek of Achaean and Trojan speech, where Achaeans repeatedly engage in public, ritualized abuse: "Achaeans are proficient at blame, while Trojans perform praise poetry." Taunting songs are present in the Inuit culture, among many others. Flyting can also be found in Arabic poetry in a popular form called naqā’iḍ, as well as the competitive verses of Japanese Haikai. In Central Europe there is a widespread tradition of (often vulgar) rhyming couplets between two groups as in Romanian strigături, Croatian bećarac, or Hungarian csujogatás. Echoes of the genre continue into modern poetry. Hugh MacDiarmid's poem A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, for example, has many passages of flyting in which the poet's opponent is, in effect, the rest of humanity. Flyting is similar in both form and function to the modern practice of freestyle battles between rappers and the historic practice of the Dozens, a verbal-combat game representing a synthesis of flyting and its Early Modern English descendants with comparable African verbal-combat games such as Ikocha Nkocha. In the Finnish epic Kalevala, the hero Väinämöinen uses the similar practice of kilpalaulanta (duel singing) to defeat his opponent Joukahainen. ¹

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Flyting”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. ¹

flyting is exchange of insults in the form of verse, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition. ²

The source record links this tradition to 3 external registers, which can be verified through the citation. ²