From the obscure word flite, meaning to quarrel or dispute, the term flyting is most properly applied to a genre of Scottish poetry that seems to have originated in the late 15th or early 16th century, in which two poets exchanged vigorous, scurrilous, and often vulgar and profane invective. It has remained a feature of Scottish poetry even through the 20th century, but its origins are more difficult to trace.
Some scholars point out a tradition within heroic poetry of boasting matches between leaders prior to battle—a kind of exchange that can be seen, for example, in the OLD ENGLISH poem The BATTLE OF MALDON, where the leader of the Viking warriors engages in an insulting exchange with Byrhtnoth, the English commander. Similar verbal sparring occurs as well in some of the CHANSONS DE GESTE. Other scholars point to poetic debates like the Provençal TENSO as influential on the flyting. Still others attribute the Scottish flyting to the tradition of the Celtic bards, whose heirs the Scottish poets may have felt themselves to be.
The best-known example of a flyting is the 552-line Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie. The type of invective common to such poems can be seen in a few lines that close Dunbar’s first harangue of Kennedie:
Muttoun dryver, girnall river, gadswyver—
fowl fell the;
Herretyk, lunatyk, purspyk, carlingis pet,
Rottin crok, dirtin dok—cry cok, or I sall quell the.
(Kinsley 85, ll. 246–48)
(That is, “mutton driver, granary plunderer, marebuggerer— fowl strike you down; heretic, lunatic, pickpocket, darling of old women; old ewe with sheep-rot, filthy arse—admit defeat, before I shall slay you.”)
Bibliography
■ Kinsley, James, ed. The Poems ofWilliam Dunbar. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979.
Encyclopedia of medieval literature. 2013.