Before the curtain rises on the Valkyries, let us see what has happened
since it fell on The Rhine Gold. The persons of the drama will tell us
presently; but as we probably do not understand German, that may not
help us.
Wotan is still ruling the world in glory from his giant-built castle
with his wife Fricka. But he has no security for the continuance of his
reign, since Alberic may at any moment contrive to recover the ring,
the full power of which he can wield because he has forsworn love. Such
forswearing is not possible to Wotan: love, though not his highest need,
is a higher than gold: otherwise he would be no god. Besides, as we have
seen, his power has been established in the world by and as a system
of laws enforced by penalties. These he must consent to be bound by
himself; for a god who broke his own laws would betray the fact that
legality and conformity are not the highest rule of conduct--a discovery
fatal to his supremacy as Pontiff and Lawgiver. Hence he may not wrest
the ring unlawfully from Fafnir, even if he could bring himself to
forswear love.
In this insecurity he has hit on the idea of forming a heroic bodyguard.
He has trained his love children as war-maidens (Valkyries) whose duty
it is to sweep through battle-fields and bear away to Valhalla the souls
of the bravest who fall there. Thus reinforced by a host of warriors,
he has thoroughly indoctrinated them, Loki helping him as
dialectician-in-chief, with the conventional system of law and duty,
supernatural religion and self-sacrificing idealism, which they believe
to be the essence of his godhood, but which is really only the machinery
of the love of necessary power which is his mortal weakness. This
process secures their fanatical devotion to his system of government,
but he knows perfectly well that such systems, in spite of their moral
pretensions, serve selfish and ambitious tyrants better than benevolent
despots, and that, if once Alberic gets the ring back, he will easily
out-Valhalla Valhalla, if not buy it over as a going concern. The only
chance of permanent security, then, is the appearance in the world of a
hero who, without any illicit prompting from Wotan, will destroy Alberic
and wrest the ring from Fafnir. There will then, he believes, be no
further cause for anxiety, since he does not yet conceive Heroism as
a force hostile to Godhead. In his longing for a rescuer, it does not
occur to him that when the Hero comes, his first exploit must be to
sweep the gods and their ordinances from the path of the heroic will.
Indeed, he feels that in his own Godhead is the germ of such Heroism,
and that from himself the Hero must spring. He takes to wandering,
mostly in search of love, from Fricka and Valhalla. He seeks the First
Mother; and through her womb, eternally fertile, the inner true thought
that made him first a god is reborn as his daughter, uncorrupted by his
ambition, unfettered by his machinery of power and his alliances with
Fricka and Loki. This daughter, the Valkyrie Brynhild, is his true will,
his real self, (as he thinks): to her he may say what he must not say to
anyone, since in speaking to her he but speaks to himself. "Was Keinem
in Worten unausgesprochen," he says to her, "bleib es ewig: mit mir nur
rath' ich, red' ich zu dir."
But from Brynhild no hero can spring until there is a man of Wotan's
race to breed with her. Wotan wanders further; and a mortal woman bears
him twins: a son and a daughter. He separates them by letting the girl
fall into the hands of a forest tribe which in due time gives her as a
wife to a fierce chief, one Hunding. With the son he himself leads the
life of a wolf, and teaches him the only power a god can teach, the
power of doing without happiness. When he has given him this terrible
training, he abandons him, and goes to the bridal feast of his daughter
Sieglinda and Hunding. In the blue cloak of the wanderer, wearing the
broad hat that flaps over the socket of his forfeited eye, he appears in
Hunding's house, the middle pillar of which is a mighty tree. Into that
tree, without a word, he strikes a sword up to the hilt, so that only
the might of a hero can withdraw it. Then he goes out as silently as he
came, blind to the truth that no weapon from the armory of Godhead can
serve the turn of the true Human Hero. Neither Hunding nor any of his
guests can move the sword; and there it stays awaiting the destined
hand. That is the history of the generations between The Rhine Gold and
The Valkyries.