By the period of Puranic Hinduism, in the medieval period, the language of the hymns had become "almost entirely unintelligible", and their interpretation mostly hinged on mystical ideas and sound symbolism.
According to the Puranic tradition, Ved Vyasa compiled all the four Vedas, along with the Mahabharata and the Puranas. Vyasa then taught the Rigveda samhita to Paila, who started the oral tradition. An alternate version states that Shakala compiled the Rigveda from the teachings of Vedic rishis, and one of the manuscript recensions mentions Shakala.
Madhvacharya, a Hindu philosopher of the 13th century, provided a commentary of the first 40 hymns of the Rigveda in his book Rig Bhashyam. In the 14th century, Sāyana wrote an exhaustive commentary on the complete text of the Rigveda in his book Rigveda Samhita. This book was translated from Sanskrit to English by Max Müller in the year 1856. H.H. Wilson also translated this book into English as Rigveda Sanhita in the year 1856. Sayanacharya studied at the Sringeri monastery.
A number of other commentaries (bhāṣyas) were written during the medieval period, including the commentaries by Skandasvamin (pre-Sayana, roughly of the Gupta period), Udgitha (pre-Sayana), Venkata-Madhava (pre-Sayana, c. 10th to 12th centuries) and Mudgala (after Sayana, an abbreviated version of Sayana's commentary).
Some notable commentaries from Medieval period include:
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, reformers like Swami Dayananda Saraswati (founder of the Arya Samaj) and Sri Aurobindo (founder of Sri Aurobindo Ashram) discussed the philosophies of the Vedas. According to Robson, Dayananda believed "there were no errors in the Vedas (including the Rigveda), and if anyone showed him an error, he would maintain that it was a corruption added later".
According to Dayananda and Aurobindo the Vedic scholars had a monotheistic conception. Sri Aurobindo gave commentaries, general interpretation guidelines, and a partial translation in The secret of Veda (1946). Sri Aurobindo finds Sayana's interpretation to be ritualistic in nature, and too often having inconsistent interpretations of Vedic terms, trying to fit the meaning to a narrow mold. According to Aurobindo, if Sayana's interpretation were to be accepted, it would seem as if the Rig Veda belongs to an unquestioning tradition of faith, starting from an original error. Aurobindo attempted to interpret hymns to Agni in the Rigveda as mystical. Aurobindo states that the Vedic hymns were a quest after a higher truth, define the Rta (basis of Dharma), conceive life in terms of a struggle between the forces of light and darkness, and sought the ultimate reality.
The Rigveda, in contemporary Hinduism, has been a reminder of the ancient cultural heritage and point of pride for Hindus, with some hymns still in use in major rites of passage ceremonies, but the literal acceptance of most of the textual essence is long gone. Musicians and dance groups celebrate the text as a mark of Hindu heritage, through incorporating Rigvedic hymns in their compositions, such as in Hamsadhvani and Subhapantuvarali of Carnatic music, and these have remained popular among the Hindus for decades.
According to Axel Michaels, "most Indians today pay lip service to the Veda and have no regard for the contents of the text." According to Louis Renou, the Vedic texts are a distant object, and "even in the most orthodox domains, the reverence to the Vedas has come to be a simple raising of the hat". According to Andrea Pinkney, "the social history and context of the Vedic texts are extremely distant from contemporary Hindu religious beliefs and practice", and the reverence for the Vedas in contemporary Hinduism illustrates the respect among the Hindus for their heritage.
The Rig Veda plays a role in the modern construction of a Hindu identity, portraying Hindus as the original inhabitants of India. The Rigveda has been referred to in the "Indigenous Aryans" and Out of India theory. Dating the Rig Veda as contemporaneous with (or even preceding) the Indus Valley civilisation, an argument is made that the IVC was Aryan, and the bearer of the Rig Veda. Indian nationalist Bal Gangadhar Tilak, in his Orion: Or Researches Into The Antiquity Of The Vedas (1893) has concluded that the date of composition of the Rigveda dates at least as far back as 6000–4000 BCE based on his astronomical research into the position of the constellation Orion. These theories are controversial, and not accepted or propagated in mainstream scholarship.
The Rigveda is considered particularly difficult to translate, owing to its length, poetic nature, the language itself, and the absence of any close contemporary texts for comparison. Staal describes it as the most "obscure, distant and difficult for moderns to understand". As a result, he says, it "is often misinterpreted" – with many early translations containing straightforward errors – "or worse: used as a peg on which to hang an idea or a theory." Another issue is technical terms such as mandala, conventionally translated "book", but more literally rendered "cycle". Karen Thomson, author of a series of revisionary word studies and editor of the Metrically Restored Text Online at the University of Texas at Austin, argues, as linguists in the nineteenth century had done (Friedrich Max Müller, Rudolf von Roth, William Dwight Whitney, Theodor Benfey, John Muir, Edward Vernon Arnold), that the apparent obscurity derives from the failure to discard a mass of assumptions about ritual meaning inherited from Vedic tradition.
The first published translation of any portion of the Rigveda in any European language was into Latin, by Friedrich August Rosen, working from manuscripts brought back from India by Colebrooke. In 1849, Max Müller published his six-volume translation into German, the first printed edition and most studied. H. H. Wilson was the first to make a translation of the Rig Veda into English, published from 1850–88. Wilson's version was based on a commentary of the complete text by Sāyaṇa, a 14th-century Sanskrit scholar, which he also translated.
Translations have since been made in several languages, including French and Russian. Karl Friedrich Geldner completed the first scholarly translation into German in the 1920s, which was published after his death. Translations of shorter cherrypicked anthologies have also been published, such as those by Wendy Doniger in 1981 and Walter Maurer in 1986, although Jamison and Brereton say they "tend to create a distorted view" of the text. In 1994, Barend A. van Nooten and Gary B. Holland published the first attempt to restore the entirety of the Rigveda to its poetic form, systematically identifying and correcting sound changes and sandhi combinations which had distorted the original metre and meaning.
Some notable translations of the Rig Veda include:
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