ABSTRACT
Clearly, agonism is not exclusive to verbal performance in the oral tradition. Moreover, it wields that violence far beyond the battleground landscapes reflected in the preceding excerpts from ancient India and ancient Greece. Style it like a tug of war-and a war housed in highly interpersonal relations: Hera against Zeus; Achilles against Hector; Grendel's Mother against Beowulf; or Gilgamesh battling Enkidu, followed by Gilgamesh with Enkidu battling Humbaba. True, in noncombat scenarios, such amplification—such overamplification, redundant as that may sound—may derive from the poet’s attempt to reflect other contingencies: the physical struggles endemic to life, the hardships associated with ruling a kingdom. In the Anglo-Saxon tradition, there was even a word for this tradition of trading insults: flyting. One might need verbally to summon the sins or bad deeds of a past foe or, more belligerently, to remind one’s contemporary of his scandalous misbehavior—such as in having murdered his brothers, his “own close kin.”.
