Flyting

This unfamiliar term denotes a swearing match or competition in insult, a form with a long tradition, being found in Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon literature, where the participants are both legendary and historical. This development is itself unusual, being the polar opposite of the reticence greatly valued in Germanic society. However, the genre became most highly developed in the Scottish court in the sixteenth century, remarkably among aristocrats and major poets. The most famous examples are The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy (ca. 1503), The Flyting of Montgomerie and Polwart (ca. 1585), and a similar contest between King James V and Sir David Lindsay (ca. 1537). Although forms of verbal dueling like “playing the dozens” and “sounding” among youths in the United States have some similar features, there are no modern equivalents showing the same individual and extended displays of verbal skill in the fine art of savage insult. (All the Scottish flyting matches are carried out in quite complex forms of alliteration.) The key similarity between the genres, however, is that language that would normally be taboo and extremely provocative does not lead to hostilities, but is tolerated in this particular conventional use.

The northern provenance of flyting is apparent in the Norse root flyta , which covered a variety of heroic “eggings” (or provocations) and scatological insults apparent in the sagas, notably in the skaldic tirades of the Icelander Egil Skallagrimsson in Egil’s Saga (ca. 1200). Egil was a historical skald , or bard, whose extempore effusions were both verbally complex and savagely satirical. He showed total fearlessness in his flyting verses, to the point of grievously insulting Eric Bloodaxe, king of Norway (946-949) and his queen, Gunnhild. In his nið (“curse”), uttered in the king’s presence, Egil calls him, “This inheriting traitor [who] disinherits me by betrayal” and later “Lawbreaker not lawmaker … brothers’ murderer … [whose] guilt stems all from Gunnhild” ( Egil’s Saga , chapters 56-57). The king did not retaliate. (Incidentally, English scold is cognate with Old Norse skald .)

In the Eddic poems there are similar examples of calumny and slander in contests between Odin and Thor, and between Loki and the other gods. In his flyting with the gods ( Lokasenna ), Loki singles each out, stanza by stanza, accusing them of cowardice, adultery, incest, and homosexuality. As Einarsson points out, the most famous heroic instance of mannjafnaðr , or “man matching” is the verbal contest between the two royal brothers Sigurdr and Eysteinn, sons of King Magnus berfœttr (“barefooted”) in Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla (1957, 38-39). However, the context shows that this match is more of a performance put on by the brothers to entertain their retinues. Eysteinn explains: “It has often been an ale custom to match men against each other” ( Heimskringla 1932, 624). Elsewhere in the comparatively uncensored provenance of Old Norse, there are far more survivals of set-piece insult than is the case in early English. Among them were the flim and the niðvisur , which specialized in the foulest infamy.

The cognate Anglo-Saxon term flitan had the broader sense of “contend or strive,” though the meanings of “chide, wrangle, or scold” were also included. It is possible to see vestiges of flyting in the sharp exchanges in the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf between the hero and the enigmatic, provocative character Unferth, a person of undefined office who sits in a privileged position at the feet of the Scylding king, Hrothgar (ll. 499-661). This curious exchange has attracted a variety of modern interpretations, as a piece of flyting, an exchange of ritual insults between champions, a piece of fooling, or an elaborate exercise in irony. (See Short 1980.) Another instance lies in the insults traded by the Saxons and the Vikings before they join battle in The Battle of Maldon (11th century).

More developed examples are the medieval debate poems The Owl and the Nightingale (ca. 1250) and Chaucer’s Parlement of Foulys (ca. 1382). The first is an anonymous text from which the more fulsomely vituperative sections were excised in the early editions. The poem uses two new phrases for “strong language,” namely fule worde (“foul words”) and the coarser schit worde (“shit words”), the latter in a context with an interesting class gloss: “So herdsmen offend others with shit words” (l. 286). Although the poem is sophisticated in many ways, dealing with a range of moral and religious issues in the manner of the medieval débat , or debate, it has a considerable scatological element.

Chaucer’s Parlement of Foulys also has clear elements of flyting, although the poem belongs to another medieval genre, the love vision. Set on St. Valentine’s Day, the love decision of the tercel eagles, the highest in rank, involves the whole avian parliament, provoking increasingly uncourtly, sharp, and impatient responses as the debate moves down the hierarchical scale. As in his delightful animal fable of Chantecleer and the Fox in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale , Chaucer makes considerable humorous capital by applying human idioms to the fowls:

“Wel bourded [joked],” quod the doke [duck], “by min hat!”
(l. 589) The goos seyde, “Al this nys nat worth a flye!”
(l. 501)

As the tone descends, the tercelet intervenes to upbraid a low comment in these terms:

“Now fy, cherl!” [“Now shame on you, peasant!”]
“Out of the donghil cam that word ful right!”
[“That word came straight out of the gutter!”]
(l. 596-97)

The juxtaposition of animal noises and human conventions is often sharp: “Now parde! fol!” (Now, by God, you idiot!") is followed by “Ye quek!” (“You quack!”). Most of the idiom of abuse is taken from secular references, but a tercel “of lower kynde [rank]” makes his declaration of love “by seint John” (l. 451). These stylistic differences are, assuredly, Chaucer’s sociolinguistic observation on the oaths of his time.

In his edition of William Dunbar, W. Mackay Mackenzie included as traditional influences on flyting “the agon or ‘altercation,’ one of the essential elements of the Old Comedy of Greece,” as well as parallels in Arabic, Italian, and Celtic (1932, xxxii). There were, however, various Continental antecedents, such as the Provençal sirvente, tenso , and partimen , as well as a tradition of Latin invective from St. Jerome through some of the fifteenth-century humanists to Erasmus. Mackenzie defined the genre in a vigorous metaphor as a “verbal tournament a outrance” [to the bitter end] (1932, xxxii), stressing that the roots of flyting lie in competition and in the demonstration of skill, not solely in personal execration.

Flyting can be called, paradoxically, “the fine art of savage insult,” since the Scottish participants were noted authors and their works are neither repetitive, nor extemporaneous, nor crude. Indeed, James Kinsley surmises that the Flyting between Dunbar and Kennedy (which is over 550 lines long) “may have developed in a series of attacks and counter-attacks circulated in manuscript at court” (1979, 284). Dunbar (who has his own entry) was a Master of Arts, a Franciscan preaching friar, a priest in court service for a number of years, and the recipient of a royal pension from King James IV. Kennedy, who had similar academic qualifications, was greatly admired as a poet and was of the blood royal.

What makes the Scottish flytings the more striking is that they occur in a country with a vehement tradition against profanity. (Documentary evidence is to be found in the entry for fines and penalties. ) However, these texts demonstrate an astonishing use of language so sophisticated and so foul that it clearly belongs to a convention of linguistic versatility quite unfamiliar to us, having been long obsolete. It was evidently designed as an entertainment for a sophisticated, not a “common” audience, as has also been argued for the fabliau . “Montgomerie and Polwart flyted one another in a variety of metres and forms which were designed to demonstrate their versatility to the court audience for whom the whole exercise was presumably staged” (Jack 1988, vol. I, 51).

In the Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy , every conceivable insult is hurled: sexual, religious, natural, social, excretory (and many that baffle the imagination or amaze with their directness). Dunbar opens the altercation with some hyperbolic threats of how the sea would burn, the moon would suffer eclipse, and rocks would shatter, should he choose to “flyte.” This provokes from Kennedy the immediate opening riposte “Dirtin [filthy] Dunbar,” the first of an astonishing catalog, which includes “fantastick fule” (fool) and “wan fukkit funling” (ill-conceived foundling) (ll. 35-38). Dunbar replies in kind, using equally personal insults, such as:

Cuntbitten crawdon [pox-smitten coward]

Crawdon , an obsolete dialect term, contains a rich resonance of masculine contempt, since the sense of “coward” derives from a cock that will not fight. The remarkable adjective cuntbitten intensifies the insult by playing on the various meanings of cock . Less subtly, but succinctly, Kennedy calls Dunbar “a shit but wit” (l. 496) who would “like to throw shit by the cartload” (l. 469). (This is one of the earliest uses of shit as a personal insult.) He then launches a ferocious alliterative assault, using all the categories of abuse:

Deuill dampnit dog, sodomyte insatiable
…
Thy commissar Quintine biddis the cum kis his ers
[Your associate Quintin [a Scots poet] bids you come and kiss his arse]
(ll. 527-35)

This last line shows the astonishing range of register, since commissar is an ancient title of rank, implying that Quintin was a superior poet, while the vulgar phrase “to kiss someone’s arse” obviously meant, as it still does, to be completely servile. (The Latin phrase osculum in tergo was often used of worship of the Devil; today a kiss-arse refers to a toadying underling.) The exchanges contain an amazing range of cultural reference and the earliest recorded instances of several current terms of insult, notably the noun get (now git ) in its old, strong sense of “bastard”: “Fals tratour, feyndis get” (“False traitor, devil’s bastard,” 244). In the equally scurrilous The Flyting of Montgomerie and Polwart (ca. 1585) there is the invitation to “kis the cunte of ane kow” (l. 817), while the Answer to [the] King’s Flyting (l. 1535-36) contains the frenzied alliteration: “Ay fukkand [fucking] like ane furious Fornicatour” (l. 49).

In England the tradition of flyting had considerably atrophied by 1600. The most vigorous invective is to be found in the early Elizabethan stage farces, such as Ralph Roister Doister (ca. 1552) and Gammer Gurton’s Needle (acted 1566). In the latter we find such new vituperative idioms as “What the devil,” “how a murrain [plague],” “Fie shitten knave and out upon thee,” “the pox,” “bawdy bitch,” “that dirty bastard,” “the whoreson dolt [idiot],” “for God’s sake,” and “that dirty shitten lout.”

There are also vestiges of flyting in some of the violent confrontations in Elizabethan tragedy, such as Hamlet’s caustic repartee, the furious exchanges between Lear and Kent, and the berating of Oswald by Kent in King Lear (II ii 14-22). In all of these there is a savage irony and bitter humor. There are also features of flyting in the comic stichomythia of The Taming of the Shrew and Much Ado About Nothing. (Stichomythia is a highly formalized series of sharp exchanges in which two characters deliver one line at a time, rather like a rally in a tennis match.) The following is from the opening of hostilities between Petruchio and Katharina in The Taming of the Shrew:

Katharina: I knew you at the first,
         You were a moveable [piece of furniture]

Petruchio: Why, what’s a moveable?

Katharina: A joint-stool.

Petruchio: Thou hast hit it. Come and sit on me.

Katharina: Asses are made to bear, and so are you.

Petruchio: Women are made to bear, and so are you.

(II i 197-201)

However, the great Shakespearean scenes of linguistic confrontation are essentially passionate expressions of character-conflict in which language is taken in deadly earnest, and lives are irrecoverably changed or even destroyed. Flyting, on the other hand, has an essential element of license, of wordplay, since otherwise the grievous insults would lead to duels and other extreme modes of exacting satisfaction. Flyting has died out in the United Kingdom. The main survivors of the genre are those forms of verbal dueling recorded among black youths in America and termed variously, “playing the dozens,” “playing,” and “sounding.”