Flyting

Flyting is a contest consisting of the exchange of insults, often conducted in verse, between two parties.

Description
Flyting is a ritual, poetic exchange of insults practiced mainly between the 5th and 16th centuries. The root is the Old English word flītan meaning quarrel (from Old Norse word flyta meaning provocation). Examples of flyting are found throughout Norse, Anglo-Saxon and Medieval 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 and the poem Hárbarðsljóð in which 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 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 where makars would engage in verbal contests of provocative, often sexual and scatalogical 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 2024 prices) for a lord or a whipping for 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 word shit 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 the Nicholas Udall's Ralph Roister Doister and John Still' Gammer Gurton's Needle from the same era.

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 part of many cultures such as Inuit civilization. Flyting also existed in Arabic poetry in a popular form called naqa'id, 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.

Robert Hendrickson, The Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins refers to flyting as a form of logomachy (i.e., word fighting) and cites its use by pre-Islamic Arabs, who hurled curses at the enemy as they went into combat, as a colorful example.

Flyting is similar in both form and function to the modern African American practice of freestyle battles and the historic practice of the dozens.

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" ("Matthew, I to thee say that thine shovel is now blunt after years of misuse").