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 gap between ages is proven precisely by the finding: the knowledge did not descend by transmission, because transmission was severed; it had to be dug up.
Before the catastrophe the gods' golden age is defined by golden tafl-pieces: 'In their dwellings at peace they played at tables, / Of gold no lack did the gods then know' (st. 8). After Ragnarok, on the reborn earth: 'In wondrous beauty once again / Shall the golden tables stand mid the grass, / Which the gods had owned in the days of old' (st. 61) — the elder age survives the gap as objects found lying in the grass.
The chapters carry discovery-rubrics: ch. 64 'was found in the foundations of the shrine of Hennu by the chief mason' in the reign of the Dynasty-I king Semti/Hesepti; the Nebseni papyrus says it was found at Khemennu 'on a block of ironstone written in letters of lapis-lazuli, under the feet of the god.' Ch. 30B was found by prince Herutataf under Menkaura, 'inscribed on a slab of iron... in the handwriting of the god Thoth' — a text no living scribe wrote.
Voluspo 61 Bellows wording ('golden tables... mid the grass, which the gods had owned in the days of old') verified via mimisbrunnr.info's comparative stanza edition and the sacred-texts Bellows text. Rubric wording (Hennu shrine, Semti, ironstone in lapis letters, Herutataf and the iron slab in Thoth's handwriting) verified against Budge's 1895 introduction as mirrored at sacred-texts and Project Gutenberg #7145.
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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.
Two unconnected traditions furnish the between-worlds interval identically: everything drowned back into one primeval water; a span measured in cosmic units (millions of years / a night of Brahma); and the sole survivor a god withdrawn into or onto a SERPENT, explicitly unseen by men and gods, waiting out the gap.
Same skeleton with no shared geography: humanity's crime is an affront to the senior god's comfort or dignity, a council formalizes extermination, the killing is halted mid-course by subversion within the pantheon itself, a remnant survives, and the wearied god afterward binds or removes himself.
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.