Flyting or fliting is a contest consisting of the exchange of insults between two parties, often conducted in verse.
Etymology
The word flyting comes from the Old English verb flītan meaning 'to quarrel', made into a noun 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 Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue gives the first attestation in this sense as The Flyting of Dumbar and Kennedie, from around 1500.
Description
Flyting is a ritual, poetic exchange of insults practised mainly between the 5th and 16th centuries. Examples of flyting are found throughout Norse, Celtic, Old English and Middle English 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 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 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. The Flyting of Dumbar and Kennedie records a contest between William Dunbar and Walter Kennedy in front of James IV, which includes the earliest recorded use of the wordshit as a personal insult. In 1536 the poet Sir David Lyndsay composed a ribald 60-line flyte to James V after the King demanded a response to a flyte. Flytings appear in several of William Shakespeare's plays. Margaret Galway analysed 13 comic flytings and several other ritual exchanges in the tragedies. Flytings also appear in Nicholas Udall's Ralph Roister Doister and John Still's Gammer Gurton's Needle from the same era. While flyting died out in Scottish writing after the Middle Ages, it continued for writers of Celtic background. Robert Burns parodied flyting in his poem, "To a Louse," and James Joyce's poem "The Holy Office" is a curse upon society by a bard. Joyce played with the traditional two-character exchange by making one of the characters society as a whole. . Title: Kissing the Pope's Feet. German peasants respond to a papal bull of Pope Paul III. Caption reads: "Don't frighten us Pope, with your ban, and don't be such a furious man. Otherwise we shall turn around and show you our rears."
Similar practices
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. 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 Finnic Kalevala the hero Väinämöinen uses similar practice of kilpalaulanta to win opposing Joukahainen.
Modern portrayals
In "The Roaring Trumpet", part of Harold Shea's introduction to the Norse gods is a flyting between Heimdall and Loki in which Heimdall utters the immortal line "All insults are untrue. I state facts." The climactic scene in Rick Riordan's novel The Ship of the Dead consists of a flyting between the protagonist Magnus Chase and the Norse god Loki.
Recreation
In a May 2010 episode of the Channel 4 series Time Team, archaeologists Matt Williams and Phil Harding engage in some mock flyting in Old English written by Saxon historian Sam Newton to demonstrate the practice. For example, "Mattaeus, ic þé onsecge þæt þín scofl is nú unscearp æfter géara ungebótes".
