At the root of the world-ash that "extends to the frost-giants" lies "the well of Mimer," and what it holds is not gold but wisdom: in it "knowledge and wisdom" are concealed. Its keeper drinks from it each morning. When the god the record calls Alfather — the All-father — "asked for a drink from the well," he paid a hard toll for it: he "left one of his eyes as a pledge." The old prophecy the record quotes still keeps the bargain — "Where you hid your eye: / In the crystal-clear / Well of Mimer", and "Mead drinks Mimer / Every morning / From Valfather’s pledge."

The book that carries this is the Prose Edda, also called the Younger Edda — Old Norse prose set down about 1220 by the Icelander Snorri Sturluson, and staged as a long catechism in which one Ganglere puts his questions and the figures Har and Jafnhar answer. The record files this well among the treasures of the giants, though the fit is loose and worth saying plainly: the hoard here is wisdom, not gold, and the giant is only half-glimpsed in the frost-giants' root beside the well. Of all the witnesses gathered under a giant's treasure — Irish and Estonian tales, a Hessian one, and the Edda's own hoards of poetic mead and gold — only this single Icelandic well is wired to served text; the rest wait unread.

If a giant's treasure can be wisdom instead of gold, is the hoard the well itself — or the eye the god sank to the bottom of it to taste what it kept?