Flyting

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.

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 2025 prices) for a lord, or a whipping for a servant.

Flyting can also be found in Arabic poetry in a popular form called naqā’iḍ, as well as the competitive verses of Japanese Haikai.

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.

[18] In the Finnish epic Kalevala, the hero Väinämöinen uses the similar practice of kilpalaulanta (duel singing) to defeat his opponent Joukahainen.