Handy

By the way, Kelly, gothr meaning good and gothr meaning god are two different words. One of them (good) has an accent over the o. As far as I can tell, the two words are not related.

Handgothr would mean hand-good or handy. But there is nothing about any god in the word.

Laginn means deft or skillful, and is (as far as I can tell) from the verb leggja, which means to lay or place, but also to build or set to rights, and a lot of other things. Lay has as many meanings in Old Norse as it has in English.

There is much to be said for either word.

For those of you who are not Kelly, this is an example of science fictional obsession with odd bits of fact. "God is in the details," as someone (Einstein?) said. And you can't write good SF (including good sf-fantasy) if you don't pay attention to the details.