Knud Rasmussen collects thousands of Inuit qilaat songs (drum-dance poems) across Greenland, Arctic Canada, and Alaska, documenting improvised insult songs (ivtornit), hunting magic chants, and shamanic spirit journeys (qaarnerneq). These poems use paired parallelism, repetition, and nature-based metaphor (sea mammals, ice, aurora) from pre-Christian animist folklore, often performed in competitive song duels to settle disputes.

Rasmussen's collections influenced 'Eskimo' poetry anthologies and inspired Canadian poets (Al Purdy, Tom Lowenstein) to adapt Inuit oral structures—non-linear narrative, environmental embodiment, ritual insult—into English verse. The drum-song tradition's song-duel form (similar to flyting) provided models for Alice Notley's and Anne Carson's adversarial poetic dialogues. It proves how legal-ritual folklore (dispute resolution through poetry) generates high-stakes performance genres absent in Western literary traditions.