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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. 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.
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.
set against Vendidad, Fargard 2
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