Henrik Schück wrote at the turn of the 20th century that he considered Rydberg the "last —and poetically most gifted —of the mythological school founded by Jacob Grimm and represented by such men as Adalbert Kuhn" which is "strongly synthetic" in its understanding of myth.

[6] While many modern scholars object to any systematization of the mythology including the one imposed by Snorri Sturlusson, believing it artificial, John Lindow[7] and Margaret Clunies Ross[8] have recently supported a chronological systemization of the most important mythic episodes as inherent in the oral tradition underlying Eddic poetry.

[11] In the first comprehensive review of the work in English, in 1894, Rydberg's "brilliancy" and "great success" were recognized, alongside an acknowledgement that he sometimes "stumbles badly" in his effort to "reduce chaos to order.

The Kommentar states: "Because there is no explicit revelation in the poem Hárbardsljóð concerning the identity of the title figure, Harbard, who is concealed under this name remained disputed until the end of the 19th century.

[19] In 2004, Swedish Doktorand (PhD student) Anna Lindén reviewed the full two-volume work on mythology, concluding in part that it was not more widely received because it was not fully available in one of the three international languages of scholarship: English, German or French.

As Fredrik Gadde explained, “the book was reviewed by several German scholars, who all took up a more or less disparaging attitude towards Rydberg’s methods of investigation and his results.”[23]Those contemporary scholars "although they speak with high praise of the author's learning, his thorough insight, his ability occasionally to throw light upon intricate problems by means of ingenious suggestions" were especially critical of what they see as Rydberg’s “hazardous etymologies, his identification of different mythical figures without sufficient grounds, his mixing up of heroic saga and myth, and, above all, his bent for remodelling myths in order to make them fit into a system which (they say) never existed.”[23] The resemblance between Loki and Prometheus, which indeed cannot be denied, was mostly considered to be a proof of his character as a fire-god, even going back to the Aryan period.

His explication of the Siritha-episode is an example of his approach, and yet he probably was right when he identified Siritha with Freyja.”No one has commented upon Saxo's mythology with such brilliancy, such minute consideration, and such success as the Swedish scholar, Viktor Rydberg.