The word for the vessel

A detached vellum leaf, Icelandic, carries stanzas of Vafþrúðnismál, the poem in which Odin, unrecognized, trades questions with a giant older than the earth. Asked what he remembers farthest back, the giant answers: Bergelmir, uncounted winters before the earth was made, laid on the lúðr. Beside the stanza, in a smaller contemporary hand, a scribe has written:

“Snorri’s book tells how the blood of the slain giant drowned all that kin save this one, who went up with his wife and was kept. I have asked what the lúðr was. A man of the north country said: the frame that bears the quern; his mother stood at one all her days. The monks said: a trunk hollowed out, which receives a child at its birth and a man at his death. Snorri’s book will not say. It keeps the very word and sets no other beside it: only the blood rising, and the giant going up. Yet I read boat there as if it stood written on the page, so that the giant rode over the blood as Noah rode over the water. One word, three vessels, and every answer came at once, mine among them, without wonder, as if none of us had ever heard the other answers. I do not choose. Grind him, coffin him, or carry him over: in every reading the flood fails. The heathen kept the word after the meaning went from them, and I have begun to think the meaning did not go. It was gathered in, and the word was left out for us, as a net is left in water.”

The gloss is unsigned. The dispute it records remains open in the professional literature of the present day; the manner of the disputants is as the scribe describes. The archive files the dispute as maintained, not unresolved. See finding 06. Transcription confidence: 94%. The spelling of the word varies witness to witness, as spellings of the period do; no witness sets another word in its place. Only the meaning divides.