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The Valkyries Greeting to the Day

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The Valkyries Greeting to the Day

The Sigrdrifa Prayer is a passage in the Eddic poem sometimes called the Sigrdrifumal, preserved in the Poetic Edda, in which the valkyrie Sigrdrifa, woken from an enchanted sleep by the hero Sigurd, greets the powers of the world and the gods. Rising, she hails the day and the night, the earth and the sky, and the gods and goddesses, and asks them for wisdom, eloquence and healing hands, and for success in the counsel she is about to give. The passage has become well known in modern Heathenry, which has adopted it as a prayer of greeting to the day and the divine, and it is among the Eddic texts most often used devotionally in the reconstructed tradition. As with the other Eddic poems, the text was written down in medieval Iceland, some time after the conversion to Christianity, from older oral material, and it offers a rare instance of what reads as a formal prayer of blessing and greeting within the surviving Norse poetry, which is why the modern movement has taken it up.

Because the Poetic Edda was set down by Christian scribes in medieval Iceland, generations after the official conversion, scholars continue to debate how much of a passage like this one preserves genuine pre-Christian devotional language and how much reflects later literary shaping, a caution that applies to nearly all surviving Old Norse religious poetry. Modern Heathen groups who recite the prayer typically present it as an adaptation of the source rather than a verbatim historical liturgy, translating and sometimes reordering its lines for use as a personal or communal greeting to the morning.

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