Christian Scribes, Pagan Material, and the Gap Between Them

The poem survives only in the thirteenth-century Icelandic manuscript tradition, principally the Codex Regius, written down by Christian scribes several centuries after Iceland's own conversion to Christianity around the year 1000, meaning this invocation, along with the rest of Sigrdrifumal, passed through the hands of writers whose own religious commitments differed from the pre-Christian material they were preserving, a transmission gap scholars of Old Norse religion treat as significant context for how confidently the text's content can be read as reflecting authentic, unaltered pre-Christian devotional practice. Despite this uncertainty, the poem's underlying material, including its runic lore and its invocation of natural elements as sources of wisdom and healing, is generally believed by scholars to draw on genuinely older oral tradition predating its written form by a considerable margin, since its content shows relatively little obvious Christian theological influence compared to some other material in the same manuscript tradition.

As one of the relatively few extended first-person invocations surviving from the Old Norse corpus, comparable in this specific respect to material such as the shorter Oddrun's Blessing also catalogued in this atlas, Sigrdrifa's prayer offers scholars unusually substantial, though still historically mediated, evidence for how Norse religious address to natural and divine powers might have been structured.