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flyting, a slanging match in verse, usually between two poets who insult each other alternately in profanely abusive verses. The finest example from the strong Scottish tradition is the early 16th‐century Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie. The term has also been applied to the boasting matches between warriors in some epic poems. See also amoebean verses, débat, invective.

 
 
Obscure Words: flyting


a dispute or exchange of personal abuse in verse form
 
Wikipedia: flyting

Flyting is a contest of insults, often conducted in verse. The word has been adopted by social historians from Scots usage of the fifteenth and sixteenth century in which poetic "makars" (makaris) would engage in public verbal contests of high-flying, extravagant abuse; the classic written example is the Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie. The convention can be detected earlier in the confrontation of Beowulf and Unferth.

In Norse and Germanic cultures, flytings are used as either a prelude to battle or as a form of combat in their own right. The exchange is regular, if not ritualized, and the insults usually center on accusations of cowardice or sexual impropriety or perversion. Several poems of Norse Mythology contain many flytings or consist solely of flytings, including the Eddic poem Lokasenna, wherein Loki insults the Norse gods in the hall of Aegir, told by Snorri Sturlusson[1].

Hilary Mackie has detected in the Iliad a consistent differentiation between representations in Greek of Achaean and Trojan speech,[2] where Achaeans repeatedly engage in public, ritualized abuse: "Achaeans are proficient at blame, while Trojans perform praise poetry" (Mackie 1998:83).

Flytings existed in Arabic poetry in a popular form called naqa'id. Taunting songs are part of Inuit village culture. Flyting is similar in both form and function to the modern African American practice of the dozens and freestyle battles.

Notes

  1. ^ "The flyting of Loki".
  2. ^ Mackie, Talking Trojan: Speech and Community in the Iliad (Lanham MD: Rowmann & Littlefield) 1996, reviewed by Joshua T. Katz in Language 74.2 (1998) pp 408-09.

 
 

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Copyrights:

Literary Dictionary. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Copyright © Chris Baldick 2001, 2004. All rights reserved.  Read more
Obscure Words. © 2008 by Michael A. Fischer http://home.comcast.net/~wwftd Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Flyting" Read more

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