Description:
Insult contests appear in various cultures throughout history, right up to the present day, both as literary motifs and as social practice. Consider modern rap battles in Black American culture, roasts, and other forms of structured exchanges of insults. Flytings are usually conducted in verse, also not too different from a rap battle.
In the medieval North, these contests are called a flyting/fliting in Old English, which has become the de facto name for Germanic insult contests generally. The word comes either from Old English (ge)flit, "argument, debate, contest," or from the verb flītan "to quarrel, fight, contend." In Old Norse, they are called senna ("quarrel," possibly from sannr, "true," or sanna, "to assert, to prove") and mannjafnaðr ("comparison of men"). Both of these are formalized exchanges of insults between two contestants where the goal is to disparage the opponent and degrade their social standing to the benefit of one's own. They may or may not lead to physical violence, sometimes taking place within settings where peace is enforced, like in a hall or in the presence of a ruler; but other times they seem like a form of intimidation, meant to dishearten one's opponents before battle. The actual practice of such insult contests of course predate their appearance in literature, but literature is the only place we have record of them from this period, like all other speech acts. As such, the debate around flyting is generic, meaning it is concerned with categories and types of these contests as we have them from different Germanic cultures and sources.
While some scholars, such as Carol Clover, have described senna and mannjafnaðr to be merely two words for the single category of insult contest, which was already described in English scholarship with the term flyting, Marcel Bax and Tineke Padmos have argued that they actually do describe two different forms of insult contest, and that they are native Old Norse forms rather than simply 'copies' of the flyting. The senna is a direct contest of insults and word-play, where contenders both issue deprecatory statements and defend themselves from the insults of their opponents. The mannjafnaðr is rather a boasting contest where claims about one's prowess (for example, in battle or in sex) are implicitly also insults about the opponent's (lack of) skill in the same area. They are also different in the complexity of their play, where a senna acts out as a series of singular exchanges of retorts, while a mannjafnaðr has rounds that can last many different 'turns' of responses (Bax and Tineke 2017, 571–573).
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| Lokasenna | Lokasenna ("Loki's Quarrel," "Loki's Senna") is one of the poems in the
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