Ahura Mazda warns Yima that 'fatal winters' with fierce, deadly frost will fall on the material world, snow deep even on the mountain tops. Yima builds the Vara, a sealed enclosure stocked with 'the seeds of sheep and oxen, of men, of dogs, of birds, and of red blazing fires... the greatest, best, and finest.' Inside there are no visible stars, moon, or sun, and 'a year seems only as a day.'
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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.
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).
set against Poetic Edda, Vafthruthnismol 44–45
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