The age is killed by a superlative winter, and a hand-picked remnant is sealed inside a hidden enclosure — a walled garden, a wood — carrying the seed-stock of the world, to sleep out the gap and repeople the next age. In both texts the interregnum itself goes unnarrated: inside the Vara a year passes as a day and the sky is invisible; of Lif and Lifthrasir nothing is told between hiding and emergence. The missing age is preserved only as the shape of a shelter.
Ahura Mazda warns Yima: 'Upon the material world the fatal winters are going to fall, that shall bring the fierce, foul frost... snow-flakes fall thick, even an aredvi deep on the highest tops of mountains' (2.22). Yima is ordered to build the Vara and carry into it 'the seeds of sheep and oxen, of men, of dogs, of birds, and of red blazing fires' — 'the greatest, best, and finest' of every kind (2.25–28). Inside the sealed enclosure the stars, moon, and sun are never seen and 'a year seems only as a day' (2.40).
Odin asks what humans shall live 'when at last there comes the mighty fimbul-winter to men.' The answer: Lif and Lifthrasir ('Life' and 'Life-yearner') hide themselves in Hoddmimir's wood, 'the morning dews for meat shall they have,' and from them the races of men arise again.
Vendidad quotes verified against Darmesteter's SBE IV translation at avesta.org (verses 2.22, 2.25–28, 2.40–41). Vafthruthnismol 44–45 content (fimbul-winter question; Lif and Lifthrasir in Hoddmimir's wood, morning dew as food) verified against Bellows' 1923 stanza numbering via multiple mirrors of the Bellows edition.
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Both traditions insist the treasures of the first age were not composed by anyone living but FOUND · golden game-pieces standing in the grass, god-written slabs buried in temple foundations · physical leavings of an elder age recovered by later hands.
The identical test, posed and failed: the world-encircling sea-serpent hooked from a small boat, drawn up just far enough for a face-to-face look, and then lost.
Encirclement as the serpent's resting posture: neither text has the serpent attack · Jormungandr simply lies around all the earth in the surrounding sea, mouth closed on his own tail; Ahi lies 'couched around the waters,' holding the goddesses 'encompassed.' In both, the coil is a form of custody · the serpent holds a whole category of the world (the dry earth, the celestial waters) enclosed within its ring, keeping rather than devouring, and the enclosure persists until an outside force (Ragnarok, the bolt) breaks it.
Divinity presents a surplus of names and titles in public while the one operative name is withheld · concealment by multiplication in the Norse text, concealment by explicit sealing in the Greek, with public epithets issued as cover in both.