The rising of the curtain for the second act reveals a wild mountain-pass where Wotan, in a vast good-humour, is giving instructions to Brünnhilde with regard to the impending meeting between the injured husband and the abductor of his wife. Victory is allotted to Siegmund; Hunding, "let them choose him to whom he belongs; he is not wanted in Walhalla!" In Wotan's complacency the satisfaction speaks of this thought: At last, at last, a change of fortune,—victory to the Wälsung, after a trial of his mettle so severe and prolonged it must have broken a spirit less admirably tempered. The Valkyrie, in delight over the charge to her, breaks into her jubilant war-cry, checking herself as she perceives Fricka approaching in the chariot drawn by rams, and judges from the goddess's mercilessurging of the panting beasts that she comes for aZank, a "scold," with her husband. "The old storm!" murmurs Wotan, at sight of his liege lady dismounting and coming toward him with ultramajestic gait, "the old trouble! But I must stand and face her!" The scene following has a touch of comical in its resemblance to domestic scenes among less high-born characters, as, for instance, when Fricka says, "Look me in the eye! Do not think to deceive me!" or "Do you imagine that you can deceive me, who night and day have been hard upon your heels?" Fricka, the guardian of marriage, has come to demand justice for Hunding, vengeance upon the "insolently criminal couple." "What," asks Wotan, an unguarded and tender indulgence in his tone, "what have they done that is so evil, the couple brought into loving union by the Spring?..." "Do you feign not to understand me?" is in effect Fricka's return; "for the holy vow of marriage, the deeply insulted, I raise my voice in complaint...." "I regard that vow as unholy," says Wotan,—and the source is flagrant from which Siegmund has drawn his unpopular rules of conduct,—"which binds together those who do not love each other." But the case in question, Fricka protests, is not one simply of broken marriage-vow, "When—when was it ever known that brother and sister might stand toward each other in the nuptial relation?" "This day you have known it!" the worthy teacher of Siegmund meets her; and, all his paternal affection finding its imprudent way into his accents: "That those two love each other is clear to you. Wherefore, take honest advice: if blessed comfort is to reward your blessing, do you bless, laughing with love, the union of Siegmund and Sieglinde!" Upon this, as is hardly unnatural, the furious storm breaks over the indiscreet god; a storm of reproach, in part for personal wrongs, which the outraged goddess details, in part for his failure asruler of the earth to maintain law and right, to observe the boundaries established by himself. At the end of it, rather feebly, he tells her, in defence of his position, the thing which he had not confided to her before, plain enough indication that the goddess, to win whom he had given an eye, is not of his bosom's counsel any more. "This know! There is need of a hero who without aid from the gods should cast off the law of the gods. Such a one alone can compass the act which, however much the gods may need it done, no god can himself do." "And what may the great thing be," the dull august shrew inquires, "that a hero can do which the gods cannot, through whose grace alone a hero acts?... What makes men brave? Through your inspiration alone they are strong. With new falsehoods you are trying to elude me, but this Wälsung you shall not be able to save. Through him I strike at you, for it is through you alone he defies me!" "In wild sorrows," Wotan ventures, with deep emotion, "he grew up, by himself. My protection never helped him!" "Then do not protect him to-day!" she pursues, hatefully righteous, "take away from him the sword you gave him." "The sword?..." Her suggestion is a very sword for Wotan's heart. "Yes, the sword, strong with a charm, which you bestowed on your son." "Siegmund conquered it for himself in his need." The deep strain here shudders out its passion of repressed resentment and grief, which after this darkly underlines Wotan's misery. "You created the need, as you created the sword," she follows him up with clear-sighted accusation, almost voluble. "For him you drove it into the tree-trunk. You promised him the goodly weapon. Will you deny that it was your own stratagem which guided him to the spot where he should find it?" The effect of her words upon Wotan—to whom this mirror held up to him reveals the weakness of his scheme to create a hero whoshould act for himself, unprompted, against the gods, yet in the very manner the case of the gods demanded—still increases his wife's assurance. "What do you require?" asks Wotan at last, in gloom, heart-struck. "That you should sever from the Wälsung!" "Let him go his way!" Wotan acquiesces, smothered by this horrible, yet so clear, necessity. "But you, protect him not, when the avenger calls him out to fight!" "I—protect him not!" "Turn from him the Valkyrie!" "Let the Valkyrie determine as she will!" "Nay, she solely carries out your wishes.... Forbid her the victory of Siegmund!" "I cannot deal him defeat!" protests Wotan, in anguish, "he found my sword!" "Withdraw the charm from the sword. Let it snap in the knave's hand. Let the adversary behold him without defence!... Here comes your warlike maid.... This day must her shield protect the sacred honour of your wife. My honour demands the fall of the Wälsung. Have I Wotan's oath?" The unhappy god casts himself upon a rocky seat, in helpless loathing, and the terrible consent falls forced from his lips: "Take the oath!" Fricka, with proud tread turning from him to remount her chariot, stops to address Brünnhilde: "The Father of Armies is waiting for you. Let him tell you how he has appointed the fortune of battle."
Wotan sits with his head in his hands, like any humblest mortal hard put to it. It has been brought home to him sharply enough that the thing is not to be done, on the accomplishment of which he had so fondly built. It is not that an angry wife has interfered; it is that her argument has been sound, and that for the sake of his world a god cannot trespass against the laws he has himself made for it. It is, in fact, that kings less than others can do as they choose; that if in this he should follow his desire, it would, as Fricka has pointed out,"be all over with the everlasting gods!" But, to sacrifice the Wälsung, "brought up in wild sorrows" for this very purpose which is to be relinquished; the Wälsung who in his young life has had but one draught at the cup of joy!... It is no wonder that Wotan utters his lamentation: "Oh, divine ignominy! Oh, woful disgrace! Distress of the gods! Distress of the gods! Immeasurable wrath! Eternal regret! The saddest am I among all!"
The darling of his heart, Brünnhilde, torn by his cry, casts from her all her Valkyrie accoutrements, and, woman merely and daughter, kneels at his feet, presses her cheek against him, begging to be trusted: "Confide in me! I am true to you. See, Brünnhilde pleads!"
He hesitates, while sorely yearning for the comfort. "If I utter it aloud, shall I not be loosing the grasp of my will?" "To Wotan's will you speak in speaking to me. Who am I, if not your will?"
With the assurance to himself: "With myself solely I take counsel, in talking to you,..." he relates to Brünnhilde all the events which have brought about this intolerable position, a long story: the first mistake in trusting Loge; the mistake in possessing himself of the Ring; what he has since done to obviate the effect of his mistakes, and done, as is now shown, in vain. "How did I cunningly seek to deceive myself! So easily Fricka exposed my fallacies! To my deepest shame she looked through me. I must yield to her will." "You will take away then the victory from Siegmund?" "I touched Alberich's Ring," Wotan replies, "covetously I held the gold. The curse which I fled from, flees not from me! What I love I must desert, murder what from all time I have held dear, treacherously betray him who trusts me!..." Again, it is no wonder his tormented soul breaks forth in lamentation.The mighty groan of Wotan has, if ever groan had, adequate cause, and his longing for "the end! the end!" With grim comfort he recalls at this moment that the end cannot be far,—not if there be truth in the prophecy of Erda: "When the dark enemy of love shall in wrath beget a son, the end of the Immortals will not be long delayed." For the loveless Alberich, as Wotan knows, has by means of gold won the favour of a woman, and the "fruit of hatred" is on its way toward the light. "Take my blessing, son of the Nibelung!" cries Wotan in his dark mood; "the thing which sickens me with loathing, I bestow it upon you for an inheritance: the empty splendour of the gods!"
"Oh, tell me, what shall your child do?" entreats the daughter, shaken by the sight of her father's passion. "Fight straightforwardly for Fricka," he orders her, in the excess of bitterness; "what she has chosen I choose likewise; of what good to me is a will of my own?" "Oh, retract that word!" she beseeches, "you love Siegmund.... Never shall your discordant dual directions enlist me against him. For your own sake, I know it, I will protect the Wälsung!" At this first intimation of rebellion in his child,—this incipient treachery of his own will,—Wotan becomes stern, lays down his command irrevocably, with threats of crushing retribution if this child of his shall dare to palter with his expressed will. "Keep a watch over yourself! Hold yourself in strong constraint! Put forth all your valour in the fight!... Have well in mind what I command: Siegmund is to fall! This be the Valkyrie's task!"
Brünnhilde gazes after him in wonder and fear as he storms up over the rocky ascent out of sight: "I never saw Sieg-vater like that!" Sadly she resumes her armour, woe-begone at the thought of the Wälsung, given over to death. Becoming awareof the approach of Siegmund and Sieglinde, she hastens from sight.
Sieglinde enters, fleeing in distraction from Siegmund, anxious in pursuit. The presumption of those seeing her action without understanding her words, is commonly, I suppose, that remorse has overtaken her for her breach of the moral law. Remorse, indeed, has assailed her, but not for having followed the "luminous brother." It is for having ever belonged to Hunding, whom she neither loved nor was loved by. The new sentiment of love so completely possessing her places her former union in the light of unspeakable pollution, and she adjures the "noble one" to depart from the accursed who brings him such a dowry of shame. Siegmund with sturdy tenderness assures her that whatever shame there is shall be washed away in the blood of him who is responsible for it, whose heart Nothung shall cleave. An insanity of terror seizes Sieglinde at the thought of the meeting between the two men, the vision besetting her of Siegmund torn by Hunding's dogs, against the multitude of which his sword is of no use. At the picture painted by her delirium of Siegmund's fall, shocked as if at the actual sight of it, she sinks unconscious in his arms.
Having ascertained that she has not ceased to breathe, almost glad perhaps for her of this respite from self-torment, he lets her gently down on to the ground, and seats himself so as to make an easy resting-place for her head.
Thus the Valkyrie finds them. At her approach, three solemn notes are heard which intimate as if something awful and not to be escaped—whose solemn awfulness consists in great part of the fact that it cannot be escaped,—like Fate. "Siegmund!" she calls him, with firm voice, "look upon me! I am that one whom in short space you must follow!" Siegmund lifts his eyes from the sleeping face upon which they havebeen fondly brooding, and beholds the shining apparition. "Who are you, tell me, appearing to me, so beautiful and grave?" "Only those about to die can see my face. He who beholds me must depart from the light of life. On the field of battle I appear to the noble alone. He who becomes aware of me, has been singled out for my capture!" Siegmund gazes quietly and long and inquiringly into her eyes, and: "The hero who must follow you, whither do you take him?" "To the Father of Battles who has elected you, I shall lead you. To Walhalla you shall follow me." "In the hall of Walhalla shall I find none but the Father of Battles?" "The glorious assemblage of departed heroes shall gather around you companionably, with high and holy salutation." "Shall I in Walhalla find Wälse, my own father?" "The Wälsung shall find his father there." "Shall I in Walhalla be greeted gladsomely by a woman?" "Divine wish-maidens there hold sway; the daughter of Wotan shall trustily proffer you drink." "Unearthly fair are you; I recognise the holy child of Wotan; but one thing tell me, you Immortal! Shall the bride and sister accompany the brother? Shall Siegmund clasp Sieglinde there?" "The air of earth she still must breathe. Siegmund shall not find Sieglinde there!" The hero bends over the unconscious woman, kisses her softly on the brow, and turns quietly again to Brünnhilde: "Then bear my greeting to Walhalla! Greet for me Wotan, greet for me Wälse and all the heroes; greet for me likewise the benign wish-maidens: I will not follow you to them!"
In this strangely impressive and moving dialogue, the Brünnhilde-part is upborne on the stately, high and cold Walhalla theme; the Siegmund-part gives over and over one urgent heartful questioning phrase, filled with human yearning and sorrow: the motif of love and death. "Where Sieglinde livesin joy or sorrow, there will Siegmund likewise abide,..." he pronounces. When he is informed that he has no choice but to follow, that he is to fall through Hunding, that its virtue has been withdrawn from his sword, justly incensed, he declares that if this be true,—if he, shame to him! who forged for him the sword, allotted him ignominy in place of victory, he will not go to Walhalla, Hella shall hold him fast!
"So little do you care for eternal joy?" the Valkyrie asks wistfully; "all in all to you is the poor woman who, tired and full of trouble, lies strengthless in your lap? Nothing beside do you deem of high value?" Inexpressibly moved at the manifestation before her of the warmth and depth of this human affection, she begs him to place his wife under her protection. He replies passionately that no one while he lives shall touch the Stainless One, that if he must indeed die, he will first slay her in her sleep. Brünnhilde, in great emotion, begs still more urgently, "Entrust her to me, for the sake of the pledge of love which she took from you in joy!" But Siegmund, all the more firmly fixed in his resolve, lifts his sword, and grimly offering Nothung two lives at one blow, swings it above the sleeping woman. The Valkyrie at this can no longer keep in bounds the surging flood of her compassion: "Hold, Wälsung!" she restrains his arm, "Sieglinde shall live, and with her Siegmund!... I change about the doom of battle. To you, Siegmund, I apportion blessed victory...." With injunctions to place his trust in the sword and the Valkyrie, bidding him farewell till they shall meet on the field, she disappears. Siegmund, with heart restored to gladness, bends over Sieglinde again; listens to her breathing and studies her face, now smiling, as he sees, in quiet sleep. "Sleep on!" he speaks to her, "till the battle has been fought and peace shall rejoice you!"
Hunding's horn has already been heard, calling out the adversary. Siegmund lays Sieglinde gently down, and, Nothung in hand, rushes to the encounter. A storm has been gathering, a cloud has settled over the mountain-tops. Sieglinde, left alone, murmurs in her sleep. Her broken sentences reveal her dream: She is a child again and the scene is reenacted to her of the conflagration which ended her life in the forest with father and mother and twin. She starts awake in affright, calling Siegmund, and finds herself alone. She hears her husband's horn and his call to Wehwalt to stand and meet him. She hears Siegmund's arrogant reply. She cannot see them for the black storm-scud, but calls on them to stop, to kill her first. A flash of lightning shows Hunding and Siegmund fighting on a high point of the rocky pass. Sieglinde is rushing toward them, when a sudden glare blinds her. In the light, Brünnhilde is seen hard at Siegmund's side, defending him with her shield. "Strike home, Siegmund! Trust to the victorious sword!" Siegmund raises his sword for a deathblow to Hunding, when a fiery beam drops through the storm-cloud; in the red glow of it is distinguished the form of Wotan at Hunding's side, holding his spear between the combatants. His voice is heard, terrible: "Back from the spear! To pieces, the sword!" Nothung snaps against the spear, and, run through the body by his adversary, Siegmund falls. Sieglinde hears his dying sigh—the strong heart stops on a brief snatch, pathetic, of the motif of the heroism of the Wälsungen—She drops to earth, stunned. In the gloom, Brünnhilde, who has retreated before the angry father's spear, is seen lifting Sieglinde and hurrying off: "To horse! that I may save you!"
Long and mournfully Wotan gazes upon the fallen Siegmund—best-beloved perhaps of all the Wagner heroes. Taking account suddenly of the presence of Hunding, "Begone, slave!"he orders, "kneel before Fricka, inform her that Wotan's spear has taken vengeance of that which brought mockery upon her!... Begone!... Begone!..." But at the gesture with which the command is emphasised, Hunding drops dead, crushed out of life by the god's contempt.
Abruptly recalled to the thought of his child's contumacy, Wotan starts up in terrific wrath: "But Brünnhilde! Woe to that offender! Dreadful shall be the punishment meted to her audacity, when my horse overtakes her in her flight!" Amid lightning and thunder, aptly symbolising the state of his temper, the god vanishes from sight.
The third act shows the scene, a high rocky peak rising from among great pine-trees, where the Valkyries assemble for their return together to the hall of Wotan. On the clouds they come riding, each with a dead warrior laid across her steed. Over the neighing and hoof-beats, the music develops of a lightly thundering cavalry-charge, suggestive of the rocking in the saddle of horsemen borne over billowing expanses—glorious with the glory of the hosts which fancy sees among the crimson and gold banners of the sunset. The eight are at last arrived; their war-cries, their hard laughter, and the shrill neighing of the battle-steeds mingle in harsh harmony. The shrieks of an autumn gale, exulting in its freedom to drive the waves mountain-high and scatter all the leaves of the forest, have the same quality of wildness and force and glee. The steel-corseleted figures clustered on the peak make one think a little of gleaming dragon-flies seen in summer, swarming as they do around some point of mysterious interest. The laughter of the Valkyries is for grim jests they exchange over the conductof their horses, who fall to fighting with one another, because the dead warriors on their backs were enemies in life. Brünnhilde only is wanting, to complete their number, but they dare not start for Walhalla without her, lest Walvater, not seeing his favourite, should receive them with a frown. They are amazed, when they finally see her coming, to descry on the back of her horse no warrior, but a woman—amazed, likewise, at the wild speed of Grane's flight, and to see him stagger and drop on reaching the goal. They hurry to Brünnhilde's assistance. She comes in, breathless with terror and haste, supporting Sieglinde. Wotan, she informs the wondering sisters, is hot in pursuit of her. She begs one of them to keep lookout for him from the top of the peak. The black storm-cloud on which he rides is perceived sweeping toward them from the north. To the questioning Valkyries Brünnhilde gives in quick outline the story of her disobedience, and implores their help to save Sieglinde,—for the Wälsungen all Wotan has threatened with destruction. She conjures them, too, to conceal herself, who has not the hardihood to face her father in the extremity of his indignation. But the sisters are appalled at the revelation of her misdeed, and no less at the suggestion that they should join in her act of rebellion. Her prayer for the loan of one of their horses on which the woman may escape, meets with obtuse looks, headshakes, uncompromising denial. She is appealing urgently, hurriedly, to one after the other, when Sieglinde who, stony, death-struck, dazed with grief, has appeared unconscious, up to this moment, of all taking place around her, stops her, stating dully that there is no need to trouble about her, since her only wish is to die. She indeed reproaches Brünnhilde for her care, and bids her now, if she is not to curse her for their flight, to end her life by a thrust of the sword. In the next moment the face of this samewoman sheds the very radiance of joy: the Valkyrie has revealed to her that of her a Wälsung shall be born. Then, oh, "Save me, you valiant one!" she cries. "Save my child! Protect me, you maidens, with your mightiest protection! Save me! Save the mother!" She kneels to them. The cool-blooded spinsters are moved by this, but not to the point of braving Wotan's ire. "Then fly in haste, and fly alone!" Brünnhilde with sudden resolve bids Sieglinde: "I will remain behind and draw upon me, delaying him, Wotan's anger." "In what direction shall I go?" asks the woman eagerly. Eastward, one of the sisters tells her, lies a forest. Fafner there, in the shape of a dragon, guards the treasure of the Nibelungen. An unsuitable place for a helpless woman, yet one where she will be safe from Wotan, for the god, it has been observed, shuns it. "Away then to eastward," Brünnhilde instructs Sieglinde; "with undaunted courage bear every trial. Hunger and thirst, thorns and stony roads—do you laugh at want and sorrow, for one thing know, and keep it ever in mind: the most exalted hero in the world, O woman, shall be born of you!" A great melodious phrase describes him, the future Siegfried, as if with one magnificent stroke outlining a form of heroic beauty and valour. Brünnhilde gives Sieglinde the pieces of Siegmund's sword, gathered up from the field after the ill-fated encounter. "He who one day shall swing this sword newly welded together, let him take his name from me: As Siegfried let him rejoice in victory!" From the soul of Sieglinde rises a soaring song of gratitude and praise, a song of purest, highest joy. Her last words to Brünnhilde, as clasping to her breast the broken sword she hastens away, are, interpreted: "My gratitude shall one day reward you, smiling at you in human form!... Farewell! Sieglinde in her woe calls down blessings upon you!"
The storm-cloud has reached the rock, Wotan's voice is heard: "Brünnhilde, stand!" At the sound of it, Brünnhilde's heart fails her; the hearts of the sisters, too, soften. Crowding together on the rocky peak, they let the culprit cower out of sight among them. But Wotan is not deceived; he addresses to the hidden daughter such sharp and searching reproaches that, her fear for herself losing all importance as these strike her heart, she steps forth from among the sister-Valkyries and meekly stands before her father, awaiting condemnation.
"Not I," he speaks, "punish you. Yourself you have framed your punishment!" And he exposes how by forgetting the whole duty of a Valkyrie—to deal victory or defeat according to Wotan's decree—she had made herself in effect no longer a Valkyrie. "No more shall I send you from Walhalla.... No longer shall you bring warriors to my hall.... From the tribe of the gods you are cut off, rejected from the eternal line.... Our tie is severed.... You are banished from my face!" The sisters break into lamentation. "Upon this mountain I banish you. In undefended sleep I shall seal you. Let the man then capture the maid who finds her upon his road and wakes her." The sisters endeavour to restrain him, pointing out that their own honour will suffer from such a scandal. He rejects this on the ground that they have nothing more whatever to do with the faithless sister. "A husband is to win her feminine favor; masterful man is henceforth to have her duty. By the fireside she shall sit and spin, an object of scorn to all beholders!" Brünnhilde drops at his feet, overwhelmed. Cries of horror and protest break from the others; he drives them from his presence with the threat of a similar fate to Brünnhilde's if they do not forthwith depart from her, and keep afar from the rock where she suffers her sentence. In a confusion of terror, which is not without the slightest point ofhumour, the strong girls flee like leaves in the blast before Wotan's menace,—and Brünnhilde is left alone to plead her poor cause with the stern incensed father.
She conjures him first to silence his anger, and define to her the dark fault which has impelled him to reject the most loyal of his children. "I carried out your order," she protests. "Did I order you to fight for the Wälsung?" he inquires. "You did," she reminds him. "But I took back my instructions." "When Fricka had estranged you from your own mind.... Not wise am I, but this one thing I knew, that the Wälsung was dear to you. I was aware of the conflict which compelled you to turn from the remembrance of this.... I kept in sight for you that which, painfully divided in feeling, you must turn your back upon. Thus it was that I saw what you could not see. I saw Siegmund. I stood before him announcing death. I met his eye, I heard his voice, I apprehended the hero's ineffable distress.... I witnessed that which struck the heart in my bosom with awe and trembling. Timid and wondering I stood before him, in shame. I could think only how I might serve him.... And confidently counting upon an intimate understanding of him who had bred that love in my heart,—of that will which had attached me to the Wälsung,—I disobeyed your command!"
Wotan, in meeting this, shows how he is not merely a father dealing with a disobedient child, but a man in strife with himself, with his own will which has betrayed him into following affection, inclination, when duty called for an opposite course. "If thy right hand offend thee, cut if off and cast it from thee." Brünnhilde is to Wotan that offending flesh and blood, and the safety of the future depends, it seems, upon his breaking his own heart by cutting her off from himself. She has done what his heart would have had him do; but for interests whose claimupon him is in his estimation greater than that of affection (einer Welt zu Liebe: for the sake of a world), he had elected not to follow his heart's impulse. And this delinquent, daughter at once and his own will, must not only be punished for the example of all the disobedient, but cut off from himself, to provide absolutely against any possible repetition of the so lovable and forgivable offence.
Brünnhilde, when she has heard him out, has no word further of argument or defence, but acquiesces with sad submissiveness. "Certainly the foolish maiden is no fit helpmate for you, who, confused by your amazing counsel, did not understand your mind, when her own mind prompted one thing only: to love that which you loved!" She accepts the punishment as just, only: "If you are to sever that which was bound together," she pleads, "to keep apart from yourself the very half of yourself, that I was once completely one with you, O god, forget it not! Your immortal part you cannot wish to dishonour. You cannot intend an ignominy which involves you.... Yourself you would be degraded, if you gave me over to insult!" "You followed, light of heart, the call of love," Wotan replies unconcedingly: "follow now him whom you must love!" "If I must depart from Walhalla, if I am to be your companion and servant no more," Brünnhilde pressingly continues, "if my obedience is to be given to masterful man, not of a coward and braggart let me be the prize! Let him not be worthless who shall win me!" "You cut yourself off from Walvater," he repulses her; "he cannot choose for you!" "A noble generation there is, having its origin in you—" Brünnhilde suggests, still unquelled, the point is so vital to her; "the most admirable of heroes, I know it, is to spring from the line of the Wälsungen...." "Not a word of the Wälsungen!" Wotan fiercely interrupts. "When I severed from you, I severed fromthem. Doomed to destruction is that line!" Sieglinde has been saved, Brünnhilde informs him, who shall give birth to the Wälsung of whom she speaks. Wotan sternly silences her: let her not seek to shake his firmness. He cannot choose for her! He has loitered too long already. He cannot stop to consider what her wishes are, nothing further has he to do with her but to see his sentence executed.
What has he devised for her punishment, she asks.
He repeats his earlier sentence: "In deep sleep I shall seal you. He who awakes the defenceless sleeper, shall have her to wife." Brünnhilde falls on her knees to him. "If I am to be bound in fast sleep, an easy prey to the most ignoble of men, this one prayer you shall grant which a noble terror lifts to you: Let the sleeper be protected by a barrier of fright-inspiring things, that only a fearless and great-hearted hero may be able to reach me on my mountain-peak!" "Too much you demand! Too much of favour!" She clasps his knees, and with the wildest inspiration of terror: "This one prayer you must—must listen to! At your command let a great fire spring up. Let the summit be surrounded by fierce flames, whose tongues shall lick up and whose teeth shall devour any caitiff venturing near to the formidable place!" So is her whole soul heard to cry aloud in this prayer, as she pleads for so much more than her life, that all by which Wotan had fortified himself against her, and which had been subjected to an assault so prolonged, suddenly gives way, his weary heart is pierced. Overcome by emotion, he lifts her to her feet; he gazes long into her eyes, reading her soul there,—then amply, fully, with the whole of his overflowing heart, grants her prayer: "Farewell, O dauntless, glorious child! Holy pride of my heart, farewell! Farewell! Farewell! If I must shun you, if I am never more fondly to greet you, if you are no more toride at my side, or reach me the cup of mead; if I am to lose you whom I so have loved, O laughing joy of my eyes—a bridal bonfire shall blaze for you such as never yet blazed for a bride! A flaming barrier shall girdle the rock; with burning terror-signals it shall frighten away the coward. The fainthearted shall keep afar from Brünnhilde's rock. That one alone shall win the bride, who is freer than I—the god!" In a speechless ecstasy of gratitude, Brünnhilde sinks on his breast, and he holds her long silently clasped, while there floats heavenward as if the very voice of their relieved, pacified, uplifted hearts. Supporting her in his arms, gazing tenderly in her upturned face, he takes his last leave of her. There is a passage in Wotan's farewell which seems to contain, compressed into it, all the yearning ache of all farewells, with all the sweetness of the love which makes parting bitter. "For the last time.... Farewell.... The last kiss...." These words occur upon it. The motif it seems of the tragedy of last times; one wonders could custom ever so harden him to it that he should feel no clutch at the heart in hearing it. "For the last time I appease myself with the last kiss of farewell.... Upon a happier mortal the star of your eye shall beam. Upon the unhappy Immortal it must, in parting, close. For thus does the god turn away from you, thus does he kiss away your divinity!" He presses a long kiss upon each of her eyes, and the first languor of sleep falling at once upon her, she leans, without strength, against him. He supports her to a mossy knoll beneath a spreading pine-tree, and lays her gently upon it; after a long brooding look at her face, closes her helmet; after a long look at her sleeping form, covers it with the great Valkyrie shield; places her spear beside her, and with a last long sad look at the slumbering motionless figure, turns away,—having effectually desolated himself of the three dearest of his children.
Resolutely striding from the sleeper, he summons Loge, and commands him in his original form of elemental fire to surround the mountain-summit. At the shock of his spear against the rock, a flame flashes and rapidly spreads. With his spear Wotan traces the course the fire is to follow, girdling the peak. Nimbly it leaps from point to point, till the whole background is fringed with flame. At Wotan's words, "Let no one who is afraid of my spear ever break through the fiery barrier!" there falls, prophetic, across the dream of Brünnhilde's charmed sleep, the great shadow of the Deliverer, so distant yet in time, Siegfried, who when the hour came of test was found to fear Wotan's spear as little as he feared anything else.
With that firm spell placed upon his magnificent and adequate fence, Wotan departs; and, guarded by the singing flames, which weave into the rhythm of their bright dance the tenderest of lullabies, Brünnhilde is left to her long rest.
SIEGFRIED
Fafner, when he had become possessor of the Nibelungen treasure, conveyed it, as we have seen, to a cave in a lonesome forest, and there in the shape of a dragon mounted guard over it. Mime, the dwarf, in order to keep the same treasure under some sort of oversight, took up his abode in the forest, at a respectful distance from the flame-breathing monster. Alberich haunted the immediate neighbourhood of the cave.
Thus it happened that Sieglinde, directed by the Valkyries to that region, where she should be safest from Wotan's anger, was overheard by Mime, out in the lonesome wood, moaning in her trouble. He assisted her into his cave. There Siegfried was born, and there Sieglinde died. Mime reared the "Wälsungen-shoot" with solicitous care, in the ulterior view that this scion of a strong race when grown to man's size should kill Fafner for him and get him the Ring.
At the rise of the curtain we see Mime at his anvil, struggling with a heavy difficulty. He is fashioning a sword for Siegfried,—still another sword, after ever so many,—realising even as he works that no sword he can forge but will break in the lad's strong hands. "The best sword I ever forged, which in the hands of a giant would stand stiff, the insignificant stripling for whom it was shaped he whacks and snaps it in two, as if I had made him a child's plaything!" It is sober fact to Mime that he cannot use Siegfried for his purposes until he haveequipped him with a sword. "A sword there is," he continues his meditation, "which he could not break. The fragments of Nothung he never could shatter, could I weld the strong pieces together, which all my art cannot compass! Nothung alone could be of use,... and I cannot weld it, Nothung, the sword!"
Half-heartedly he has resumed his toil, when a joyous shout is heard from the forest, of which a sun-shot patch glimmers through the cave's mouth, and there storms in, driving before him a tethered bear, a magnificent youth, clad in skins, a silver horn at his side. The splendour of Siegfried's appearance is constantly referred to, the qualifications applied to him suggesting most frequently an effect he shed of light. This child of the unhappy Wälsungen seems to have been indelibly stamped with the joy of their one golden hour. Of Siegmund's tragic consciousness of frustration, of Sieglinde's sufferings, there is no trace in their vigorous offspring; but the superabundant vitality of joy which lifted them to the lovers' seventh heaven for one triumphant hour is all in his young blood. He is big, strong, sane, comely, fearless, simple, ignorant of all mean passions and interests; pensive for moments, gay for hours-nearly boisterous; frank and outspoken to the point of brutality; unmannerly at times to the point of ruffianism; but the dice are loaded to secure our cherishing him right through his bright course, by that irresistible, ingrain joyousness of his, born of strength, balance, fearlessness.
Laughing immoderately, he urges the bear against Mime, who flees hither and thither to elude the fearful pair. "I am come in double force, the better to corner you.... Brownie, ask for the sword!" When assured by the trembling Mime that the sword is in readiness, he releases and sends home his shaggy ally. But when Mime hands him the newly finishedsword, and he strikes it on the anvil, it flies to bits. The angry boy expresses his wish that he had smashed the sword on the disgraceful bungler's skull. "Shall such a braggart go on bragging? He prates me of giants and lusty fighting; of gallant deeds and solid armour; he will forge weapons for me, provide me with swords; he vaunts his art as if he could do something of account; but let me take hold of the thing he has hammered, with a single grip I crush flat the idle rubbish! If the creature were not so utterly mean, I would drop him into the forge-fire with all the stuff of his forging, the old imbecile hobgoblin! There might be an end then to vexation!" He casts himself fuming on a stone seat and turns his face toward the wall. The dwarf, who has kept his distance from the storming youth, tries to quiet him, reminds him of his benefits, of his teachings on the subject of gratitude. Ingratiatingly he brings him food. Siegfried without turning dashes spit and pipkin from his hands. The little man affects a deeply hurt sensibility. He rehearses at length all Siegfried has to thank him for, material necessities, education,—"With clever counsel I made you clever, with subtle wisdom I taught you wit...." This tale of benefactions has been gone over so often that the dwarf has reached a fine glibness in it; the smooth air on which he enumerates the instances of his kindness has a peculiar cast of hypocrisy. He is so touched by the contemplation finally of his own goodness and Siegfried's hardness of heart that he falls to weeping. "And for all I have borne this is now the reward, that the hot-tempered boy torments and hates me!"
Siegfried has been calmly gazing into Mime's eyes; trying through these to get at the truth of him. Mime expresses surprise that after so many unquestionable services the boy should hate him; and the boy is not himself without a touch of wonder at the invincible antipathy with which this creatureinspires him, to whom yet he is actually indebted for many good offices. "Much you have taught me, Mime, and many a thing have I learned of you; but that which you have most cared to teach me, never have I succeeded in learning: how I could bear the sight of you! If you bring me food and drink, disgust takes the place of dinner; if you spread an easy couch for me, sleep on it becomes difficult; if you endeavour to teach me wise conversation, I prefer to be dumb and dull. Whenever I set eyes on you, I recognise as ill-done everything you do; whether I watch you stand, or waggle and walk, ducking, nidnodding, blinking with your eyes, my impulse is to catch the nidnodder by the scruff of the neck, to hurl out of the way for good and all the odious blinker! That is my manner, Mime, of being fond of you. Now, if you are wise, help me to know a thing which I have vainly reflected upon: I run into the woods to be rid of you; how does it happen that I come back? All animals are dearer to me than you, trees and birds, the fish in the stream, I am fonder of them all than I am of you; then how does it happen that I still come back? If you are wise, make clear to me this thing!" "My child," replies Mime, "you are informed by that circumstance how near I lie to your heart!" "I tell you I cannot bear you! Forget it not so soon!" Mime argues that such a thing is impossible, is out of nature; that what to the young bird is the old bird, which feeds it in the nest until it is fledged, that is to Siegfried, inevitably, Mime! This simile of Mime's suggests to Siegfried a further question. In asking it he has one of those brief accesses of pensiveness which endear him, disclosing the existence of a common human tenderness, after all, under that sturdy wrapping of joy befitting the child of demigods. "Now, since you are so wise, tell me still another thing: When the birds were singing so blithely in Spring, the one luring the other, you told me, as I wished toknow, that they were male and female. They billed and cooed so engagingly, and would not leave each other; they built a nest and brooded in it; there was a fluttering presently of young wings, and the two cared for the young. I saw how, in the same way, the deer rested in the forest, in pairs; how even wild faxes and wolves did this. The male brought food to the lair, the female nursed the cubs. I learned from seeing this what love is—I never robbed the mother of her young...." The music has been heaving and falling, as if with the warm palpitation of a vast breast, Nature's own, blissful with love and happy creative force. "Now, where, Mime, is your loving mate, that I may call her mother?" Mime becomes cross: "What has come over you, mad boy? Now, what a numbskull it is! Are you a bird or a fox?" And at Siegfried's next question he chafes: "You are to believe what I tell you: I am your father and mother at the same time!" But Siegfried vigorously objects: "There you lie, unspeakable gawk! How the young resemble their parents I have luckily observed for myself. More than once I have come to a clear stream: I have seen the trees and animals mirrored in it; the sun and clouds, exactly as they are, appear repeated on the shining surface. My own image, too, I have seen. Altogether different from you I seemed to myself: there is as much likeness between a toad and a gleaming fish, but never yet did a fish crawl out of a toad!" This latter bit in its short extent gives an amusing, characteristic illustration of Wagner's method of painting with notes. With the first phrase, Siegfried's impatient exclamation, comes the motif of Siegfried's impetuosity; then, as he is describing it, a representation of the clear stream; upon this is sketched the image of Siegfried, in the notes of his proper motif, to which is added a bar of the heroism-of-the-Wälsungen motif, indicating his resemblance to the father beforehim. At his mention of the toad, his metaphor for Mime, we hear the hammer of the Nibelung; and at his mention of the gleaming fish, the swimming phrase that accompanies the watery evolutions of the Rhine-maidens. The ingeniousness of all this would not perhaps of itself especially recommend the piece, were it not that the scheme is worked out to such beautiful purpose that the whole thing is lovely, and that, though one should know nothing whatever of the motifs, his ear must be charmed.
Satisfied by his own logic that Mime cannot be his progenitor, Siegfried now himself answers his earlier question: "When I run into the woods in the thought of forsaking you, how does it happen that I still return home? It is because from you I am to learn who are my father and mother!" Mime evades him: "What father! What mother! Idle question!" But Siegfried catches him by the throat, and the terrified dwarf communicates, grudgingly, a scant fact or two of his history. "Oh, ungrateful and wicked child! now hear for what it is you hate me. I am neither your father nor any kin of yours, and yet to me you owe your life...." Making his own part in the story as meritorious as possible, he relates his taking into shelter the woman whom he had found moaning out in the wild woods. Siegfried, for once penetrated with sadness, wonder, and awe, breathes forth softly, when the sorrowful story is ended, "My mother—died then—of me?" He tries by questions to complete the dwarf's bare account: "Whence am I named Siegfried?" "Thus did your mother bid me call you." "What was my mother's name?" Mime feigns to have forgotten, but, roughly pressed, recalls it. "Then, I ask you, what was my father's name?" "Him I never saw!" "But my mother spoke the name?" "She only said that he had been slain." Siegfried is smitten with the suspicion that Mimemay be lying to him, and demands some proof of all this which he has heard. Mime, after a moment's resistance, in terror of the boy's rising wrath, fetches from its hiding and shows him the pieces of a broken sword. "This was given me by your mother. For trouble, cost and care, she left it as paltry remuneration. Behold it! A broken sword! Your father, she said, carried it in the last battle, when he was slain." Siegfried's strong good spirits have already returned. "And these fragments," he cries, with enthusiasm, "you are to weld together for me. Then I shall swing my proper sword! Hurry, Mime! Quick to work!... Cheat me not with trumpery toys! In these fragments alone I place my faith. If I find you idle, if you join them imperfectly, if there are flaws in the hard steel, you shall learn burnishing from me! For this very day, I swear it, I mean to have the sword!" "What do you want this very day of the sword?" Mime inquires in alarm. Siegfried, his heart inexpressibly lightened by the positive knowledge that Mime is neither father nor any kin to him, bursts into merry singing: "To go away, out of the woods into the world. Never shall I come back!... As the fish gaily swims in the flood, as the finch freely flies afar, so shall I fly, so shall I dart... that I may never, Mime, see you more!" Off he storms into the forest, leaving Mime shouting after him, a prey to the utmost anxiety. The dwarf's difficulty is now twofold: "To the old care I have a new one added!" How to retain the wild fellow and guide him to Fafner's nest, and how to mend those pieces of stubborn steel. "No forge is there whose glow can soften the thorough-bred fragments. No dwarf's hammer can compel the hard pieces...." In unmitigated despair, void of counsel, he drops on his seat behind the anvil and weeps.
Ushered by great calm chords, measured and dignified as the gait of a god on his travels, a wayfarer appears at theentrance of the cave. He wears an ample deep-blue mantle, and for staff carries a spear. On his head is a broad hat, the brim of which dips so as to conceal one of his eyes. It is Wotan. Since parting from Brünnhilde he has had no heart for warfare, no heart to ride to battle without the "laughing joy of his eyes." Alone, unresting, he has wandered all over the wide earth in search of counsel and, very likely, distraction. A spectator he is in these days and not an actor. His spirit has reached a state of philosophic calm. He has learned better certainly than to meddle any more with anything that concerns the accursed Ring. He is brought into the neighbourhood of the still interested actors in that old drama in part by curiosity; in part, no doubt, by the wish to watch the actions of Siegfried, his beloved children's child. But in some faintest degree, at least, it would seem, he is brought here by the invincible need to influence these fortunes just a little, though it be firmly fixed that he is not to try directly or indirectly to divert the Ring into any channel which shall bring it eventually to himself. All else being equal, he had a little rather strengthen Mime's chances of getting the Ring, through Siegfried, than inactively see it fall to the inveterate enemy, Alberich.
At the greeting he speaks from the threshold to the "wise smith," Mime starts up in affright: "Who is it, pursuing me into the forest wilderness?" "Wanderer is the world's name for me. Far have I wandered, much have I bestirred myself on the back of the earth." "Then bestir yourself now! and do not loiter here, if Wanderer is the world's name for you!" Mime, with his head full of his dark little projects, has a deep dread of spies and interference. At every step the Wanderer takes further into his dwelling, he utters a sharper protest; and at every protest the Wanderer calmly advances a step further. "Through much research, much have I learned," speaksWanderer, "I could impart to many a one things of importance to him; I could deliver many a one from that which troubles him—from the gnawing care of the heart." And after still another irritated dismissal from Mime: "Many a one has imagined himself to be wise, but the thing which he most needed to know, he knew not. I gave him leave to ask me what should help him, and enlightened him by my word." And after again being nervously shown the door: "Here I sit by the fireside," speaks blandly Wanderer, suiting the action to the word, "and I set my head as stake in a match of wits. My head is yours, you have won it, if you do not, by questioning me, succeed in learning what shall profit you; if I do not, by my instructions, redeem the pledge."
It is plain enough that if Mime would now expose to the Wanderer the source of the gnawing care at his heart, and ask him how Nothung might be welded, he would receive the information. Wotan is clearly eager to give it, yet cannot do so directly, or he would be too crudely meddling again in the Ring affair: he cannot press on him his counsel, but, at his old trick of ingenuous double-dealing, might by means of this guessing-game make shift to convey it to him.
Mime, old and wise as he is, has yet in certain directions a dwarfed understanding; certainly not enough generosity to trust anybody, or conceive of a disinterested desire to do him a good turn. His whole concern now is how to be rid of this large tactless personage. "I must question him in such a manner as to trap him," he says to himself. It is agreed that he shall have three questions. He sits brooding a moment, trying to find something very difficult indeed. The motif of Mime's cogitations, which has already been frequently heard in this act, gives amusingly the unheroic colour of the sordid little mind's workings. He fixes upon questions concerning things whichmight be supposed little known to a wanderer of human descent, even such a much-travelled and conceited one. First: What race reigns in the depths of the earth? Second: What race rests upon the back of the earth? Third: What race dwells on the cloudy heights? Wotan readily answers all these, giving bits of the histories of the races in question, the Nibelungen, the Giants, and the Gods. As he describes the spear of Wotan, whose lord all must eternally obey, he with an involuntary gesture of command brings his spear hard down on the stone floor. Faint thunder results. Terror falls upon Mime, who by the light shining for a moment from his countenance, has recognised the god. "You have solved the questions and saved your head," he says hurriedly, without looking Wotan in the face. "Now, Wanderer, go your way!" But the Wanderer declares that according to custom in such contests, it is the dwarf's turn now to answer three questions or lose his head. "It is a long time," Mime ventures timidly, "since I left my native place; a long time since I departed from the bosom of earth, my mother; I once saw the gleam of Wotan's eye as he looked into the cave; my mother-wit dwindles before him...." But the wee fellow has no mean conceit of his wisdom, and is really not as uneasy as might be expected of one in his position. "Perhaps I shall be so lucky," he suggests, not without complacency, "as, under this compulsion, to deliver the dwarf's head!" Wotan asks him, for the first question,—and the pain of the memories oppressing him is translated to us by the motif of parting, the motif of "last times," while the god's tones are infinitely tender—"What race is it to which Wotan shows himself stern, and which yet he loves the best of all living?" Glibly Mime answers, showing a full acquaintance with the circumstances, "The Wälsungen." Wotan passes on to the second question: "A wise Nibelung keeps watch over Siegfried.He is to kill Fafner for him, that he may get the Ring and become lord of the Hort. What sword now must Siegfried wield, if he is to deal death to Fafner?" Mime, delighted with himself, readily replies: "Nothung is the name of a notable sword.... The fragments of it are preserved by a wise smith, for he knows that with the Wotan-sword alone an intrepid stupid boy, Siegfried, shall destroy the dragon." He rubs his hands in goblin glee. "Am I, dwarf, in the second instance still to retain my head?" Wanderer, with a laugh for his antics, felicitates him: "The most keen-witted are you among the wise; who can equal you in acuteness? But seeing you are so cunning as to use the boyish hero for your dwarf-purposes, with the third question I now make bold: Tell me, wise armourer, who, out of the strong fragments, shall forge Nothung anew?" Consternation falls upon the dwarf. Who, indeed? Was not that question the very hub around which turned all his troubled reflections? Had it not been that which was forcing tears from him at the moment of the Wanderer's arrival? He runs hither and thither distracted, in broken exclamations admitting that he himself cannot forge the sword, and how should he know who can perform the miracle? The Wanderer rises from his seat beside the hearth. "Three questions you were free to ask. Three times I was open to consultation. You inquired of things idle and remote, but that which was closest to you, that which might profit you, did not enter your mind. Now that I have guessed it, you lose your senses with fright. I have won the witty head. Now, brave conqueror of Fafner, hear, doomed dwarf: Only one who has never known fear can forge Nothung anew." On his way to the mouth of the cave, he turns for another word to the chap-fallen Mime: "Look out for your wise head from this day forth: I leave it in forfeit to him who has never learned fear!" With a laugh for the double-horneddilemma in which he leaves the "honest dwarf," he passes forth into the woods.
As Mime gazes after him, violent trembling seizes the poor little smith. The flashing among the leaves of Wotan's winged horse his terror mistakes for the flaming of Fafner's gaping jaws; and the sound of a rushing approach for the monster crashing toward him through the underbrush. With the cry: "The dragon is upon me! Fafner! Fafner!" he cowers behind the anvil.
The alarming noise proves to have been only Siegfried coming with characteristic impetuosity to ask for his sword. "Hey, there! Lazy-bones! Have you finished? Quick! What success with the sword?" Mime is not in sight. His voice is heard, faint, from his hiding-place: "Is it you, child? Are you alone?" Siegfried for some time can draw no satisfactory answer from him, no matter how roughly pressed. The dwarf is caught between two difficulties, and must first of all things try to think out for himself the safest course of action. Only by one who has never known fear can Nothung, the indispensable, be forged. "Too wise am I for such work!" he soliloquizes. On the other hand, his wise head is forfeit to one who has never learned fear. Of the two difficulties, the latter is obviously the one to be first attended to. Siegfried fills the description dangerously well of the foretold fatal enemy. "How shall I contrive to teach him fear?" is Mime's nearest interest. Siegfried, irritated by his continued hesitation, finally catches hold of him. "Ha? Must I lend a hand? What have you forged and furbished to-day?" "With no care but for your welfare," answers Mime, "I was sunk in thought as to how I should instruct you in a thing of great importance." "You were sunk quite under the seat," laughs Siegfried; "what of great importance did you discover there?" "I there learned fear for your sake, that I might teach it to you,dunce." "What about fear?" Siegfried asks. "You know nothing about it, and you are thinking of going from the woods out into the world? Of what use to you would be the strongest sword, if you had no knowledge of fear?... Into the crafty world I shall not let you fare before you have learned fear." "If it is an art, why am I unacquainted with it? Out with it! What about fear?" "Have you never felt,"—asks Mime, in a voice which at the suggestion of his own words falls to quaking, "have you never felt, in the dark woods, at twilight,... when there are sounds in the distance of rustling, humming and soughing, when wild muttering gusts sweep past, disorderly fire-wisps flicker around you, a swelling confused sound surges toward you,—have you not felt a shuddering horror seize upon your limbs? A burning chill shakes your frame, your senses swim and fail; the alarmed heart trembling in your breast hammers to the point of bursting? If you have never felt these things, fear is unknown to you!" The music of fear is a darkened and discoloured fire-music through which we recognise, as if under a disguise veiling something of its beauty, the motif of Brünnhilde's sleep. If one looks for reasons, one can suppose the reference to be, as to a type of fearful things, to the terror-inspiring barrier surrounding Brünnhilde; and imagine a jesting intimation that fear, as Siegfried should eventually learn it, is the sensation suspending the heart-beats at sight of a beautiful woman in her sleep.
Siegfried has listened to Mime in amused wonder: "Strange exceedingly must that be! My heart, I feel, stands firm and hard in its place. That creeping and shuddering, glowing and shivering, turning hot and turning dizzy, hammering and trembling, I wish to feel the terror of it, I long for that delight! But how can you, Mime, bring it about?" "Just follow me. I will guide you to some purpose. I have thought it all out.I know a dreadful dragon; he has slain already and swallowed many; Fafner will teach you fear, if you follow me to his lair." "Where is his lair?" "Neidhöhle it is called. (Neid:envy;Höhle:cavern.) Eastward it lies at the end of the wood." "Then it is not far from the world?" "The world is close by." "You are to take me there, and when I have learned fear, away, into the world! So quick! Give me my sword! I will swing it out in the world!" Mime confesses that he neither has mended, nor ever can mend, the sword in question. "No dwarf's strength is equal to it. More likely," he suggests, "one who knows no fear may discover the art!" Siegfried, heartily weary of Mime's paltering, snatches up the fragments of Nothung: "Here, the pieces! Away with the bungler! My father's steel doubtless will let itself be welded by me. Myself I will forge the sword!" And he falls to work. "If you had taken diligent pains to learn the art, it would now, of a truth, profit you," remarks Mime; "but you were always lazy at the lesson. What proper work can you do now?" "What the master cannot do," Siegfried aptly retorts, "the apprentice might, if he had always minded him? Take yourself off! Meddle not with this, or you may tumble with it into the fire!" He heaps fuel on the hearth, fastens the sword in a vice and starts filing it. Mime watches him, and at this which looks like folly, cannot restrain the exclamation: "What are you doing? Take the solder! You are filing away the file!" But the disposition of the young fellow without fear shows in his method with the sword. With a brave thoroughness he reduces the whole blade to steel filings. Mime follows all his movements. "Now I am as old as this cavern and these woods, but such a thing have I never seen! He will succeed with the sword, that I plainly apprehend. In his fearlessness he will make it whole. The Wanderer knew it well! How, now, shallI hide my endangered head? It is forfeit to the intrepid boy unless Fafner shall teach him fear—But, woe's me, poor wretch, how will he slay the dragon, if he learns fear from him? How will he obtain the Ring for me? Accursed dilemma! Here am I fast caught, unless I find me wise counsel how to bring under compulsion the fearless one himself...." "Quick, Mime!" Siegfried interrupts Mime's meditations; "what is the name of the sword which I have ground into filings?" "Nothung is the name of the notable sword; your mother gave me the information." Siegfried at work falls to lusty singing, a song of primitive character, of a kind with what one can suppose Tubal-cain singing at his ancient anvil. We see him pumping the forge-bellows while the steel melts, pouring the metal into a mould, cooling the mould in a water-trough, breaking the plaster, heating the sword, hammering the red blade, cooling it again, riveting the handle, polishing the whole,—all of which actions his song celebrates: "Nothung! Nothung! Notable sword! (Neidliches Schwertis literally "covetable sword") Why must you of old be shattered? To powder I have ground your sharp magnificence. I now melt the filings in the crucible. Hoho! Hoho! Hahei! Hahei! Blow, bellows, brighten the glow! Wild in the forest grew a tree. I hewed it down, I burned the brown ash to charcoal. It lies heaped now on the hearth. The coals of the tree, how bravely they burn, how bright and clear they glow! Upward they fly in a spray of sparks and melt the steel-dust. Nothung! Nothung! Notable sword! Your powdered steel is melting, in your own sweat you are swimming, soon I shall swing you as my sword!"
Mime during this has been revolving his own problem, and has hit upon a plan which seems to him to meet all the difficulties of his case: Siegfried, beyond a doubt, will forge thesword and kill Fafner. While he is tired and heated from the encounter, Mime will offer him a drink brewed from simples of his culling, a few drops of which will plunge the boy into deep sleep, when, with the weapon he is at this moment forging, Mime will clear him out of the way and take possession of Ring and treasure. Enchanted with his inspiration, he sets to work at once preparing the somniferous drink.
Siegfried is singing at the top of his lungs: "In the water flowed the stream of fire, it hissed aloud in anger, but the cold tamed and chilled it; in the water it flows no more, stiff and hard it is become, the lordly steel—but hot blood will bathe it soon. Now sweat again that I may forge you, Nothung, notable sword!" He catches sight of Mime pottering with the cooking utensils. "There is a wise smith come to shame," the old man answers the youth's mocking inquiry; "the teacher receives lessons from his pupil; all is up with art for the old one, he will serve the young one as cook! While the young one makes iron into broth, the old one will prepare a dish of eggs!" With impish relish of the inwardness of the situation, he stirs the mixture in the pot.
"Hoho! Hahei! Hoho!" Siegfried proceeds with his work and his singing; "shape, my hammer, a hard sword! Blood once dyed your pallid blue, its trickling red brightened you, you laughed coldly, you cooled off the hot liquid. Now the fire has made you glow red, your soft hardness yields to the hammer; you dart angry sparks at me, because I have tamed you, stubborn! The merry sparks, how they delight me! Anger adorns the brave. You are gaily laughing at me, though you feign to be angry and sullen. Hoho! Hahei! By means of heat and hammer I have achieved it, with stalwart blows I have shaped you; now let the red shame vanish, become as hard and cold as you can...."
Mime is meanwhile revelling in dreams of the greatness which is to follow upon his acquisition of the Ring. He fairly skips up and down as he thinks of it all: Brother Alberich himself reduced to subjection, the whole world bowing at the nod of his, Mime's, head. No more toil, others to toil for him.... "Mime is king, Prince of the Nibelungen, lord over all! Hei, Mime! who would have thought it of you?"
"Nothung! Nothung! Notable sword!" harmoniously bellows Siegfried; "now you are fast in your hilt. You were in two, I have forced you into one. No blow after this shall break you. In the dead father's hand the steel snapped, the living son forged it anew; now its bright gleam flashes like laughter, its sharp edge cuts clean. Nothung! Nothung! Young and renewed! I have brought you back to life. You lay dead there, in fragments; now you flash lightning, defiant and brave! Show caitiffs your gleam! Strike the traitor! Fell the villain!" He waves over his head the finished sword: "Look, Mime, you smith—thus cuts Siegfried's sword!" He brings it down upon the anvil, which falls apart, cleft from top to bottom. Mime tumbles over with amazement.
The next scene shows the woods before Fafner's cave. It is night. Alberich is dimly distinguishable, lurking among the rocks, brooding his dark thoughts, as he keeps covert watch over the treasure. He is startled by what seems an untimely break of day, accompanied by a great gust of wind. This defines itself as a galloping gleam—a shining horse rushing through the forest. "Is it already the slayer of the dragon?" he wonders; "is it he, already, who shall kill Fafner?" A moonbeam breaking through the clouds reveals the form of the Wandereradvancing toward Neidhöhle. The enemies see and recognise each other. Alberich, though greatly alarmed at this inopportune presence, breaks into angry vituperation: "Out of the way, shameless robber.... Your intrigues have done harm enough!" "I am come to look on, not to act," Wotan replies, grandly mild and unruffled; "who shall deny me a wanderer's right of way?" Alberich, as if words of offence were actually missiles, showers them thick upon the unmoved god. He points out, virulently, the strength of his own position compared with Wotan's, in whose hand that spear of his must fly to pieces should he break a covenant established as sacred by the runes carved on its shaft. Wanderer, a shade weary of such a berating, yet losing little of his placidity, retorts: "Not through any runes of truth to covenants did my spear bind you, malignant, to me; you my spear forces to bow before me by its strength; I carefully keep it therefore for purposes of war." "How haughtily do you threaten in your defiant strength," the rabid Alberich continues, "yet how uneasy is all within your breast.... Doomed to death through my curse is Fafner, guardian of the treasure. Who will inherit from him? Will the illustrious Hort come once more into the possession of the Nibelung? The thought gnaws you with unsleeping care. For, let me hold it again in this fist, far otherwise than thick-witted giants shall I employ the power of the Ring; then let the holy keeper of the heroes tremble; the heights of Walhalla I shall storm with the hosts of Hella, the world then will be mine to govern!" Tranquilly Wotan receives this: "I know your meaning, but it creates in me no uneasiness. He shall rule through the Ring who obtains it." This calm of Wotan's gives Alberich the idea that the god must, so to speak, have cards up his sleeve. "On the sons of heroes," he suggests ironically, "you place your insolent reliance, fondblossoms of your own blood. Good care have you taken of a young fellow—not so?—who cunningly shall pluck the fruit which you dare not yourself break off?" "Not with me"—Wotan cuts short the discussion, "wrangle with Mime. Danger threatens you through your brother. He is bringing to this spot a youth who is to slay Fafner for him. The boy knows nothing of me. The Nibelung uses him for his own purposes. Wherefore, I tell you, comrade, do freely as you choose!" Alberich can scarcely believe that he has heard aright. "You will keep your hand from the treasure?" Serenely and broadly, Wotan declares—a touch of that tenderness in his tone which the thought of the Wälsungen always has power to arouse—"Whom I love I leave to act for himself: let him stand or fall, his own lord is he. I have no use save for heroes!" This sounds very fair; to Alberich almost too fair. He presses Wotan with further questions. The answers are elusive as oracles, but satisfy Alberich of thus much: that Wotan is himself out of the struggle for the Ring. To point his personal disinterestedness, the god even offers to wake the dragon, that Alberich may warn him of the approaching danger and peradventure receive in token of gratitude—the Ring! We suspect in this Wotan's taste for a joke, unless it be an exhibition of that other trait of the god's, the need to gratify his conscience with a comedy of fairness. At this moment he is not, it is true, interfering; but he is confidently watching the play of forces set working by him long ago. The strong Siegfried armed with the rejuvenated Sieges-schwert is a force having its impulse originally from him. At this moment, perhaps because the events immediately impending have cast their shadows across the sensitive consciousness of an at times prophet, he is in no uneasiness whatever with regard to the fate of the Ring. To Alberich's mystification, he actuallyrouses Fafner. "Who disturbs my sleep?" comes a hollow roar from the cave. The Fafner-motif is the old motif of the giants, slightly altered so that instead of the ponderous tread of the brothers it suggests the muffled ponderous beat of a gigantic sinister heart. Wotan and Alberich explain to the dragon his danger and indicate what may buy him safety. Having heard them out, Fafner, unseen in the cave, gives a long lazy comfortable yawn. "I lie and possess! Let me sleep!" Wotan laughs. "Well, Alberich, the plan failed. But abuse me no more, you rogue! One thing, I further enjoin you, keep well in mind: Everything is after its kind, and this kind you cannot alter!" The broad Erda-motif accompanies this maxim. "Take a firm stand! Put your skill to use with Mime, your brother. He is of the kind you understand better. What is of a different kind, learn now to know, too...." When Wotan disappears, the galloping is heard, through the storm-wind that for a moment agitates the leaves of the forest, of his rising Luft-ross. His obscure last words have left Alberich puzzled, sorer and angrier than ever. The air is full of curse-motif. "Laugh on, you light-minded luxurious tribe of the gods! I shall still see you all gone to destruction. While the gold shines in the light there is a wise one keeping watch—His spite will circumvent you all!" He hides himself among the tumbled rocks near the cave-mouth from the brightening light of dawn.
Mime enters guiding Siegfried. "This is the spot, go no further!" Siegfried seats himself under a great tree; they have been travelling through the woods all night. "This is the place where I am to learn fear?" he inquires light-heartedly. The excursion, as far as he knows, has for its single object to teach him that art. He is not of a suspicious turn and does not ask what interest in his education has Mime, in whoseaffection he instinctively does not believe. "Now, Mime," he instructs the dwarf, "you are after this to avoid me. If I do not learn here what I should learn, I shall fare further alone, I shall finally be rid of you!" "Believe me, dear boy," says the dwarf, "if you do not learn fear to-day and here, with difficulty shall you learn it elsewhere and at another time!" He directs the youth's eye to the black mouth of the dragon-hole and describes with griesly detail the monster inhabiting it. Siegfried listens unimpressed. Hearing, in answer to his inquiry, that the monster has a heart and that it is in the usual place: "I will drive Nothung into the overweening brute's heart!" he determines lightly. He is sceptical with regard to the lesson in fear which he has been promised. "Just wait!" Mime warns him. "What I said was empty sound in your ears. You must hear and see the creature himself.... Remain where you are. When the sun climbs high, watch for the dragon. He will come out of his cave and pass along this way to go and drink at the spring." "Mime," says Siegfried, with a laugh for his foolish big-boy joke, "if you are to be at the spring I will not hinder the dragon from going there. I will not drive Nothung into his spleen until he has drunk you up. Wherefore, take my advice: do not lie down to rest at the water's edge, but take yourself off as far as ever you can, and never come back!" Mime is too near, as he thinks, the hour of triumph, to take offence. May he not be permitted, after the fight, to refresh the victor with a drink? He will be near. Let Siegfried call him if he needs advice,... or if he finds the sensation of fear delectable!
When Siegfried has freed himself of Mime, whose company seems to become more and more unendurable as he is nearer parting from him for ever, he stretches out again under the great tree, folding his arms beneath his head. "That thatfellow is not my father," he muses, "how glad am I of that! The fresh woodland only begins to please me, the glad daylight to smile to me, now that the offensive wretch is out of my sight!" He drives away the thought of him and lets sweeter reflections gradually absorb him. The leaves rustle and waver; delicate shafts of sunshine drop through them and play over the forest floor. The exquisiteness of the hour, by its natural power over the mood, turns the lonely boy's thoughts toward the only human beings life has so far given him to love,—and in images so vague and distant! "How did my father look?" he wonders dreamily, and answers himself: "Like me, of course!" After a longer spell of gazing up among the trees, while the soft influences of the fragrant woodland world and lovely summer day still further overmaster him: "But—how did my mother look?... That I cannot in the least picture! Like the doe's, I am sure, shone her limpid lustrous eyes—only, more beautiful by far!" The thought of her death fills him with boundless sadness, but not sharp or bitter,—dreamy and sweet from its tenderness. "When she had born me, wherefore did she die? Do human mothers always die of their sons? How sad were that! Oh, might I, son, behold my mother!... My mother—a woman of humankind!" The motif of mother-love is but a slight, beautiful variation from the motif of love in nature accompanying Siegfried's reference to the deer paired in the woods, that strain like the heaving of a great heart oppressed by its burden of love. The thought of his never-known mother draws forth sighs from Siegfried's lips. A long time he lies silent. The Freia-motif, the motif of beauty, clambers upward like a dewy branch of wild clematis. All is still around, but the little wind-stirred leaves, which weave and weave as if a delicate green gold-shot fabric of sound. Against this airy tapestry suddenly stands forth like a vivid pattern thewarbling of a bird. Over and over, with pretty variations, the bird gives its note. It catches Siegfried's attention; he listens. "You sweet little bird," he at last addresses the singer up among the branches, "I never heard you before. Is your home here in the forest?..." The thought occurs to him, so natural to the simple: "Could I but understand the sweet babbling, certainly it would tell me something—perhaps about the dear mother!" He remembers hearing from Mime that one might come to understand the language of the birds. Attractive possibility! Pricked by his desire at once to bring it about, he springs up, cuts one of the reeds growing around the pool where Fafner goes to drink, and fashions it into a pipe. He tries upon it to imitate the bird-note. "If I can sing his language," is his reasoning, "I shall understand, no doubt, what he sings!" After repeated attempts, charmingly comical, and much vain mending of the reed with the edge of Nothung, he grows impatient, is ashamed of his unsuccess before the "roguish listener." He tosses away the silly reed and takes his silver horn. "A merry wild-wood note, such as I can play, you shall hear! I have sounded it as a call to draw to me some dear companion. So far, nothing better has come than a wolf or a bear. Let us see, now, what it attracts this time, whether a dear comrade will come to the call?" He places the horn to his lips and sounds the cheeryLock-weise(lure-call) over and over, with long sustained notes between the calls, during which he looks up at the bird, to see how he likes it. As a variation he plays the motifs which describe himself, the large heroic Siegfried-motif, and then the gay, rash, lesser Nothung-Siegfried motif. He has returned to the Lock-weise, and is repeating it with obstinate persistence, a-mind not to stop until the companion his lonesomeness yearns for shall have answered him when a bellowing sound behind him makes him faceabout. We had been warned already by theWurm-motif, heard before in Nibelheim, when Alberich by the power of the Tarnhelm turned himself into a dragon. Siegfried at sight of Fafner, whom the loud Lock-weise has drawn from his slumbers and his cave, laughs aloud: "My tune has charmed forth something truly lovely! A tidy comrade you would make for me!" "What is that?" roars Fafner, fixing the glare of his eyes upon the shapely form of Siegfried, insignificant in size, as he counts it. "Haha!" cries Siegfried, enchanted to hear from an animal talk which he can understand. "If you are an animal that can speak, you very likely can teach me something. Here is one who does not know fear; can he learn it from you?" "Is this insolence?" asks the amazed brute. "Call it insolence or what you please, but I shall fall upon you bodily, unless you teach me fear." Fafner laughs grimly, as if he licked his chops: "I wanted drink, I now find meat as well!" He shows the red interior of his vast jaws fringed with teeth. There is a brief further exchange of threats and jeers, then Fafner bellows: "Pruh! Come on, swaggering child!" Siegfried shouts: "Look out, bellower, the swaggerer comes!" and, Nothung in hand, leaps to the assault. Vainly Fafner spouts flame to blind and terrify him. The fight ends as it must. The dragon falls beneath the Wotan-sword, wielded by the hero without fear.