Hrafnagaldr Óðins

In his influential 1867 edition of the Poetic Edda, Sophus Bugge reasoned that the poem was a 17th-century work, composed as an introduction to Baldrs draumar.

[1] In 2002, Jónas Kristjánsson in the Icelandic daily Morgunblaðið argued in favor of an earlier dating than Bugge, perhaps to the 14th century, based on linguistic evidence and the seemingly corrupt state of the text.

[2][3] However, metrical, linguistic, and stylistic evidence all point towards a date in the 16th century at the earliest, and the scholarly consensus has rested on the seventeenth.

[7] Elsewhere she assigns a terminus post quem to when the Icelanders were familiarized with Erasmus's Adagia (1500), which she says must have been the conduit through which the poet learned the adage in nocte consilium which is adapted into the poem in st.

It involves several known figures from Norse mythology, including Odin, Iðunn, Heimdallr, Loki and Bragi, but does not appear to describe a myth known from other sources.

Hrafnagaldur Óðins is transmitted in a single version, with minimal discrepancies, contained in at least thirty-seven copies dating from the latter half of the 17th century to the 1870s, now housed in Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, Great Britain, Germany and the United States.

Árni Magnússon makes reference to the poem in a letter dated June 18, 1729 to Jón Halldórsson, Dean of Hítardalur, raising the possibility that such a manuscript was lost in the Great Fire in Copenhagen of 1728, which destroyed a large part of Arni's library, including as many as 15 bound manuscripts of Eddic poetry.

[6][22] The tome was a collaboration of several co-editors, but Lassen identifies Guđmundur Magnusson (Gudmundus Magnæus, 1741-1798) as the poem's editor, translator (into Latin), and commentator.

[25] The poem was published next in Edda Sæmundar hinns fróða, 1818, edited by Rasmus Rask and Arvid August Afzelius.

An exception is Viktor Rydberg, who in 1886 accepted the poem as authentic and sought to explain its narrative as referring to the time Idun was taken from Asgard by Thjazi.

Although this edition was "for the most part removed again in 2002", leaving only the English translation of the poem in its place,[27] Eysteinn Björnsson and Reaves' work on the poem led to the performance of the choral and orchestral work Odin's Raven Magic with music by Sigur Rós, Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson, and Steindór Andersen.