Chapters 44-95 - Germanic Mythology

Vafþrúðnismál does not mean a war-trumpet. The poem can never have meant that
Bergelmir was laid on a musical instrument.
The other meaning remains to be discussed. Lúðr, partly in its more limited sense
of the timbers or beams under the mill, partly in the sense of the subterranean mill in its
entirety, and the place where it is found, occurs several times in the poems: in the Grottisong,
in Helgakviða Hundingsbana II, 2, and in the above-quoted strophe by Snæbjörn,
and also in Gróugaldur and in Fjölsvinnsmál. If this signification is applied to the
passage in Vafþrúðnismál: var á lúður um lagður, we get the meaning that Bergelmir was
"laid on a mill," and in fact no other meaning of the passage is possible, unless an entirely
new signification is to be arbitrarily invented. 10
But however conspicuous this signification is, and however clear it is that it is the
only one applicable in this poem, still it has been overlooked or thrust aside by the
mythologists, and for this Gylfaginning is to blame. So far as I know, Vigfusson is the
only one who (in his Dictionary, p. 399) makes the passage á lúður lagður mean what it
actually means, and he remarks that the words must "refer to some ancient lost myth."
The confusion begins, as stated, in Gylfaginning. Its author has had no other
authority for his statement than the Vafþrúðnismál strophe in question, which he also
cites to corroborate his own words; and we have here one of the many examples found in
Gylfaginning showing that its author has neglected to pay much attention to what the
passages quoted contain. When Gylfaginning 7 has stated that the frost-giants were
drowned in Ymir's blood, then comes its interpretation of the Vafþrúðnismál strophe,
which is as follows: "One escaped with his household: him the giants call Bergelmir. He
with his wife took himself upon his lúður and remained there, and from them the races of
giants are descended" (nema einn komst undan með sínu hyski: þann kalla jötnar
Bergelmi; hann fór upp á lúður sinn og kona hans, og hélzt þar, og eru af þeim komnar),
etc.
What Gylfaginning's author has conceived by the lúður which he mentions it is
difficult to say. That he did not have a boat in mind is in the meantime evident from the
expression: hann fór upp á lúður sinn. It is more reasonable to suppose that his idea was,
that Bergelmir himself owned an immense mill, upon whose high timbers he and his
household climbed to save themselves from the flood. That the original text says that
Bergelmir was laid on the timbers of the mill Gylfaginning pays no attention to. To go
upon something and to be laid on something are, however, very different notions.
An argument in favor of the wrong interpretation was furnished by the Resenian
edition of the Prose Edda (Copenhagen, 1665). There we find the expression fór upp á
lúður sinn "amended" to fór á bát sinn. Thus Bergelmir had secured a boat to sail in; and
although more reliable editions of the Prose Edda have been published since from which
10 A survey of the scholarship from the late 1700s to the present demonstrates that lúður is understood as
'ark' in this passage, even to the extent that ON dictionaries now give this as a tenative definition, citing
Vafþrúðnismál 35 as its source. For example, see LaFarge/Tucker's Glossary to the Poetic Edda.