Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Sign In
Text size
100%
Theme

Norse Paganism Hymns

A hymn belonging to a wider poetic corpus, chiefly the Poetic and Prose Eddas, that mixes hymn-like praise with myth and gnomic verse. Norse religious poetry rarely separates praise from narrative as cleanly as later hymn traditions do, so the boundary of what counts as a hymn here is looser than in the Abrahamic entries.

Facts
Directory
Category
Hymns & Liturgical Texts 1
Learn More
Two Norse Religious Poems, a Skaldic Praise Poem and a Prayer in a Pagan Voice

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Norse Paganism Hymns gathers two of the atlas's Norse religious poems, one a skaldic praise poem describing carved myths and one the closest thing in Old Norse literature to a pagan prayer in a pagan voice.

Husdrapa, house poem, is a skaldic praise poem composed by the Icelandic skald Ulfr Uggason around 985 CE, according to Laxdaela saga for a wedding feast, describing three mythological scenes carved on the panels of the host's hall, Baldr's funeral, Thor's fishing expedition for the Midgard Serpent, and Heimdall's fight with Loki over the necklace Brisingamen; twelve stanzas survive, quoted by Snorri Sturluson in the Prose Edda as evidence for these myths, making the poem both religious praise poetry and a primary source for the myths it describes.

The Sigrdrifa Prayer has the valkyrie Sigrdrifa, woken by Sigurd, greet the day and the night and the gods and ask for eloquence and healing hands; it is heavily used by modern heathen reconstruction precisely because it reads as a pagan prayer in a pagan voice. The caution the atlas keeps on it is real: the Poetic Edda was written down in Christian Iceland some two centuries after conversion, and how much of the material reflects practice rather than antiquarian literary composition is genuinely disputed, the same caution that qualifies how far Husdrapa's mythological content can be trusted as pre-Christian testimony rather than later poetic elaboration.

Browse By
Sources
1. Divinity Atlas Directory Taxonomy, First Edition Category Tree
Divinity Atlas Directory Prose, First Edition Category Descriptions
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.