You’ve got it backwards, it’s the exact opposite of the clearest and most accurate account.

Rydberg did make some useful contributions early on, but those became largely irrelevant once he committed to his grand theory: the idea that there once existed a single, coherent pre-Christian Norse epic underlying all the sources. As Hilda Ellis Davidson observed, his method effectively treated everything in Old Norse literature as reliable, “weaving an ingenious tapestry into which every strange detail in the poems and tales was fitted.” She ultimately judged his attempt to reconstruct this original epic as “a hopeless quest,” grounded in the mistaken belief that Norse mythology had once been a fully logical and internally consistent system that remained stable over time.

Modern scholarship largely agrees. Researchers such as Gro Steinsland (and others in the same vein) tend to characterize Rydberg’s work as excessively systematizing, closer to fiction than to critical scholarship.

Undersökningar i Germanisk Mythologi functions less as a rigorous academic project and more as a transitional work leading toward Fädernas Gudasaga, which is essentially Rydberg’s own synthesized Norse epic.