In their youth, free from care, the Asas played with strange tablets. But they had the tablets only i arladaga, in the earliest time (Völusp., 8, 58). Afterwards, they must in some way or other have lost them. The Icelandic sagas of the middle ages have remembered this game of tablets, and there we learn, partly that its strange character consisted in the fact that it could itself take part in the game and move the pieces, and partly that it was preserved in the lower world, and that Gudmund-Mimer was in the habit of playing with tablets (Fornalder Sagas, i. 443; iii. 391-392; iii. 626, &c. In the last passages the game is mentioned in connection with the other subterranean treasure, the horn.) If, now, the mythology had no special reason for bringing the tablets from the lower world before Ragnarok, then they naturally should be found on the risen earth if the latter was Mimer's domain before. Völuspa (str. 58) also relates that they were found in its grass:
Thar muno eptir
undrsamligar
gullnar tavlor
i grasi finaz.
"There were the wonderful tablets found left in the grass (finaz eptir)."
Thus, the tablet-game was refound in the grass, in the meadows of the renewed earth, having from the earliest time been preserved in Mimer's realm. Lif and Leifthraser are found after Ragnarok on the earth of the regenerated world, having had their abode there for a long time in Mimer's domain. Nide's mountains, and Nidhog with them, have been raised out of the sea, together with the rejuvenated earth, since these mountains are located in Mimer's realm. The earth of the new era—the era of virtue and bliss—has, though concealed, existed through thousands of years below the sin-stained earth, as the kernel within the shell.
Remark—Völuspa (str. 56) calls the earth rising from the sea idjagræna:
Ser hon upp koma
audro sinni
iord or ægi
ithia græna.
The common interpretation is ithia græna, "the ever green" or "very green," and this harmonises well with the idea preserved in the sagas mentioned above, where it was stated that the winter was not able to devastate Gudmund-Mimer's domain. Thus the idea contained in the expression Haddingjalands oskurna ax (see Nos. 72, 73) recurs in Völuspa's statement that the fields unsown yield harvests in the new earth. Meanwhile the composition idja-græna has a perfectly abnormal appearance, and awakens suspicion. Müllenhoff (Deutsche Alt.) reads idja, græna, and translates "the fresh, the green." As a conjecture, and without basing anything on the assumption; I may be permitted to present the possibility that idja is an old genitive plural of ida, an eddying body of water. Ida has originally had a j in the stem (it is related to id and idi), and this j must also have been heard in the inflections. From various metaphors in the old skalds we learn that they conceived the fountains of the lower world as roaring and in commotion (e.g., Odreris alda thytr in Einar Skalaglam and Bodnar bára ter vaxa in the same skald). If the conjecture is as correct as it seems probable, then the new earth is characterised as "the green earth of the eddying fountains," and the fountains are those famous three which water the roots of the world-tree.
56.
THE COSMOGRAPHY. CRITICISM ON GYLFAGINNING'S COSMOGRAPHY.
In regard to the position of Ygdrasil and its roots in the universe, there are statements both in Gylfaginning and in the ancient heathen records. To get a clear idea, freed from conjectures and based in all respects on evidence, of how the mythology conceived the world-tree and its roots, is of interest not only in regard to the cosmography of the mythology, to which Ygdrasil supplies the trunk and the main outlines, but especially in regard to the mythic conception of the lower world and the whole eschatology; for it appears that each one of the Ygdrasil roots stands not alone above its particular fountain in the lower world but also over its peculiar lower-world domain, which again has its peculiar cosmological character and its peculiar eschatological end.