(DIE WALKUERE)
I
Wotan's idea, from which the abode of the gods received its name
of Walhalla, had been to people his halls with hordes of heroes
who should defend it from Alberich and his "army of the night."
Erda's prophecy of a dark day dawning for the gods had destroyed
Wotan's peace. The craving to know more of this drove him to seek
her in the depths of the earth. He cast upon her the spell of love
and constrained her to speak. It does not appear that he gained
from her any clear knowledge of the future; he learned chiefly, as
we gather, what were the dangers besetting him. The end threatened
through Alberich's forces, which, however, could not prevail against
the heroic garrison of Walhalla unless Alberich should recover the
Ring; through the power of the Ring he would be able to estrange
the heroes from Wotan and, turning their arms against him, overcome
him. "When the dark enemy of love (Alberich) in wrath shall beget
a son," so ran Erda's warning, "the end of the Blessed shall not
be long delayed!"
From Erda was born to Wotan a daughter, so near to her father's
heart that she seemed an incarnation of his most intimate wish,
his very will embodied; so part of himself she knew his unspoken
thought. This was Brünnhilde (from _Brünne_, corslet). With eight
other daughters,--born to Wotan from "the tie of lawless love,"
as we learn from Fricka in her tale of wrongs--Brünnhilde, the
dearest to him of all, followed her father to battle, serving him
as Valkyrie. These warlike maidens hovered over the battle-field,
directing the fortune of the day according to Wotan's determination,
protecting this combatant and seeing his death-doom executed upon
the other; they seized the heroes as they fell, and bore them to
Walhalla to form part of Wotan's guard. From these "Slain in Battle"
it was that Walhalla had its name. To make great their number,
Wotan, who earlier had by laws and compacts tried to bind men to
peace, now breathed into them a rough, bellicose spirit, goaded
them on to quarrel and revolt.
That the end of the gods, if prophecy must fulfill itself, should not
be a contemptible or pitiful one, that was Wotan's preoccupation,--to
save, if nothing more, the dignity of the Eternals; with this in
view, to keep Alberich from recovering the Ring, by which he might
work such really disgusting havoc. The Ring was in the possession
of Fafner, who had turned himself into a dragon, and in a lonely
forest-girt cave guarded it and the rest of the treasure of the
Nibelungen, for the sake of which he had killed Fasolt, his brother.
Wotan, as we have seen, could not wrest from him the Ring which he
himself had given in payment for the building of Walhalla: for the
honour of his spear he must not attempt it. Alberich, not bound as
he was to keep his hands off it, must infallibly and indefatigably
be devising means to regain possession of it. It was plain to Wotan
that he must find some one to do that which he himself could not,
some one, who, unprompted by him, should yet accomplish his purposes,
some one free as he was not. This tool who was yet not to be his
tool, since a god's good faith demanded that neither directly nor
indirectly he should meddle with the Ring, Wotan supposed he had
created for himself in Siegmund, born to him, with a twin sister,
Sieglinde, of a human mother. This boy with whom, in human disguise,
under the names of Wälse and Wolf,--Wolf for his enemies, Wälse for
his kindred,--he lived in the wild woods, he reared in a spirit of
lawlessness, wild courage, disregard of the gods. We must suppose
it to have been for the sake of preventing association with women
from softening his disposition that, while Siegmund was a child,
Wotan, sacrificing to the hardness of fibre it was his object to
produce, permitted the catastrophe which deprived the boy of mother
and sister. Returning home from a day's wild chase,--hunters and
hunted alike human,--father and son found their dwelling burned
to the ground, the mother slain, the sister gone. They lived for
years together after that, in the woods, always in conflict with
enemies, of whom their peculiar daring and strength raised them
an infinite number. In time, when the son was well grown, Wotan
forsook him, left him to complete his development alone, under
the harsh training of the calamities and sorrows fatally incident
to the temper and manner of viewing things which that father had
bred in him. The lad received the usage of a sword in the forging,
extremes of furnace and ice-brook. So he stood at last, Wotan's
pupil and finished instrument, an embodied defiance of the law and
the gods, proper to do the work which the law of the gods forbade.
Some defence against the wrath which he must inevitably rouse,
his father could not but feel impelled to provide, yet could he
not, without violating the honour which in his simple-minded way
he was striving to preserve intact, give it to him directly. He
could not bestow upon him outright a _Sieges-schwert_--magical
sword which ensured victory. But he placed one where the young
man should find it.
The piece opens with the blustering music of a storm, whose violence
is rapidly dying down.
The curtain rises upon the interior of Hunding's very primitive
dwelling, built about a great ash-tree whose trunk stands in view.
Siegmund, predestined to be ever at strife with his fellow-man, in
circumstances of peculiar distress seeks the shelter of Hunding's
roof. We see him burst into the empty hall, staggering and panting.
His spear and shield have splintered beneath the enemies' strokes;
deprived of arms, he has been forced to flee; he has been so hotly
pursued, so beaten by the storm, that upon reaching this refuge he
can no more than drop beside the hearth and lie there, exhausted.
It is his sister's house to which fate has led him, where, ill-starred
and unhappy like himself, this other child of Wälse's lives, in
subjection to Hunding, her lord, who has come by her through some
obscure commerce, and to whom she is no more than part of the household
baggage.
Hearing the rustle of Siegmund's entrance, Sieglinde hurries in,
and, beholding a stranger outstretched upon the ground, stops short
to observe him. The strength of the prostrate body cannot fail to
strike her. At his gasped call for water, she hurries to fetch it
from the spring out of doors. His perishing need is shown in the
devotion with which he drains the horn she hands him. His eyes, as he
returns it, are arrested by her face, and dwell upon it with fearless
lingering scrutiny--while the strain for the first time trembles
upon the air which, singing the love of Siegmund and Sieglinde, is
to caress our hearing so many times more. His fatigue has magically
vanished. He asks to whom he owes the refreshment afforded him.
When, at her reply and request that he shall await Hunding's return,
he refers to himself as an unarmed and wounded guest, she eagerly
inquires of his wounds. But he jumps up, shaking off all thought
of wounds or weariness. His succinct narrative of the circumstances
which have brought him to her hearth, he brings to a close: "But
faster than I vanished from the mob of my pursuers, my weariness
has vanished from me. Night lay across my eyelids,--the sun now
smiles upon me anew!" She offers the guest mead to drink, at his
prayer tasting it before him. As he returns the emptied horn, again
his eyes dwell upon her face, with an emotion ever increasing.
Both gaze in simple undisguised intensity of interest. There is
a long moment's silence between them. Then, at the love he feels
surging in his bosom, remembrance comes to Siegmund of what he is,--a
man so ill-fated that it may well be feared his ill-fortune shall
infect those with whom he comes into contact. "You have relieved an
ill-fated man," he warns her, his voice unsteady with the pang of
this recognition, "may his wish turn ill-fortune from you! Sweetly
have I rested.... I will now fare further on my way!" As he turns
to the door she detains him with the quick cry: "What pursues you,
that you should thus flee?" He answers, slowly and sadly: "Misfortune
pursues me wherever I flee. Misfortune meets me wherever I go. From
you, woman, may it remain afar! I turn from you my footsteps and
my glance." His hand is on the latch, when her sharp involuntary
exclamation stops him: "Stay, then! You cannot bring sorrow into
a house where sorrow is already at home!" Deeply shaken by her
words, he fixes his eyes questioningly upon her. She meets them
for a moment, then drops her own, sad and half-ashamed. The motif
of the Wälsungen well expresses the nobility in misfortune of these
poor children of Wälse. Siegmund returns quietly to the hearth:
"Wehwalt is my name for myself. I will await Hunding." (_Weh_:
woe, sorrow, calamity, pain; _wallen_: to govern. _Wehwalt_: lord
of sorrows.) There is no further exchange of words while they wait,
but in complete unashamed absorption they gaze at each other, and
the music tells beautifully how it is within their hearts. Hunding's
horn is heard. (_Hund:_ hound. It was, as we learn later, this
amiable personage's custom to hunt his enemies with a pack of dogs.)
Startled from her trance, Sieglinde listens, and hastens to open.
Hunding appears in the doorway, a dark figure, in helmet, shield
and spear. At sight of the stranger, he questions his wife with a
look. "I found the man on the hearth, spent with weariness. Necessity
brings him to our house," she explains. There is some sternness
apparently in Hunding's tone as he inquires: "Have you offered him
refreshment?" for Siegmund, rash and instantaneous in the woman's
defence, speaks, hard on the heels of her answer: "I have to thank
her for shelter and drink. Will you therefor chide your wife?"
But Hunding, at his best in this moment, without retort welcomes
the guest: "Sacred is my hearth, sacred to you be my house!" and
orders his wife to set forth food for them. Catching Sieglinde's
eyes unconsciously fixed upon Siegmund, he glances quickly from
one to the other, and is struck by the resemblance between them;
but the luminous look they have in common he defines, with the
constitutional dislike of his kind to that freer, more generous
type: "The selfsame glittering serpent shines out of his eyes!" He
inquires of the circumstances which have brought this stranger to
his house, and finding that Siegmund has no idea whither his wild
flight has led him, introduces himself with a dignity which commends
to us, while he is doing it, the narrow-natured, unimaginative man:
"He whose roof covers you and whose house shelters you,--Hunding
your host is called. If you should from here turn your footsteps
eastward, there, in rich courts, dwell kinsmen, protectors of Hunding's
honour!" They seat themselves at table; the host asks for this
guest's name, and as Siegmund, plunged in thought, does not at
once reply, Hunding, remarking the interest with which his wife
waits for the stranger's words, sardonically encourages him: "If
you are in doubt about trusting me, yet give the information to
the lady here. See how eagerly she questions you!" And Sieglinde,
too deeply interested, verily, to mind the thrust, proceeds further
to give it point: "Guest, I should be glad to know who you are!"
Whereupon Siegmund, as little constrained by the husband's presence
as the wife herself, with his eyes upon hers, addressing her directly,
tells his story: of Wolf, his father, of the twin sister lost to him
in infancy, the enmity of the Neidingen clan, who in the absence
of the men burned down their house, slew the mother, abducted the
sister; of his life in the forest with Wolf, their numberless foes
and perpetual warfare. Hunding recalls vaguely wild dark tales he
has heard of the mighty pair, the Wölfingen. The disappearance of
his father, Siegmund further relates, from whom he had been separated
in a fight, and whom he could never, long though he sought, find
again, nor any trace of him save an empty wolf-skin. "Then,--"
follow the strange cruel fortunes this father had arranged for
him, "then I was impelled to forsake the woods, I was impelled
to seek men and women. As many as I found, and wherever I found
them,--whether I sought for friend, or wooed for woman, always I
met with denial, ill-fortune lay upon me!" With ingenuous wonder
he describes the natural fruits of the education bestowed on him
by Wotan: "What I thought right, others held to be wrong; what
had ever seemed to me abominable, others considered with favour.
I fell into feud wherever I was, anger fell upon me wherever I
went. If I reached out toward happiness, I never failed to bring
about calamity! For that reason it is I named myself Wehwalt, I
command calamity alone!"
Hunding has listened attentively. His small superstitious heart has
taken alarm. "Fortune was not fond of you, who appointed for you
so miserable a lot. The man can hardly welcome you with gladness,
whom, a stranger to him, you approach as a guest." With a vivacity
which cannot have been the common habit of her intercourse with
her husband, Sieglinde pronounces judgment aloud and at once upon
this ungenerous speech and speaker, whose prudence must certainly,
in contrast with the Wälsung's frank magnificence of courage, seem
to her unspeakably bourgeois: "Only cowards fear one going his way
unarmed and alone!" And turning again eagerly to the guest: "Tell
further, guest, how you lately lost your arms in battle!" Siegmund
as eagerly satisfies her. The circumstances which he describes
further exemplify the disposition fostered in him by his father,
his non-recognition or acceptance of established law and custom,
however sacred, his pursuit of an ideal unattached to any convention:
He had lost his arms in the attempt to defend a damsel against
her own immediate family, bent upon marrying her against her
inclination. He had slain her brothers, whereupon the maiden, as
another perhaps would have foreseen, had cast herself upon their
bodies, sorrow annulling her resentment. He had stood over her,
shielding her from the vengeance of her kindred pressing around. His
armour had been shattered; the girl lay dead on her dead brothers.
Wounded and weaponless, he had been chased by the infuriate horde.
"Now you know, inquiring woman," he closes his narrative, "why
I do not bear the name of Friedmund!" (_Frieden:_ peace.) With
this simple sally, whose bitterness is not enough to crumple the
serene forehead, he rises and walks to the hearth, striding to
the noble march-measure we know as the motif of the heroism of
the Wälsungen,--proud in its first bars, with Siegmund's pride,
tender in the last, with Sieglinde's tenderness, loftily mournful
throughout.
"I know a wild race of men," now speaks Hunding, "to whom nothing
is holy of all that is revered by others; hated are they of all
men--and of me!" He then reveals how he himself had that day been
called out for vengeance with his clan against this officious champion
of damsels. He had arrived too late for action, and returning home,
behold, discovers the fugitive miscreant in his own house! As he
granted the stranger hospitality for the night, his house shall
shelter him for that length of time; but "with strong weapons arm
yourself to-morrow," he grimly warns him; "it is the day I choose
for combat; you shall pay me a price for the dead!" When Sieglinde
in alarm places herself between the two men, Hunding orders her
roughly: "Out of the room! Loiter not here! Prepare my night-drink
and wait for me to go to rest!" Siegmund, smothering his anger,
stands in contemptuous composure beside the hearth; his eyes frankly
follow every movement of the woman as she prepares Hunding's drink.
On her way out of the room, she pauses at the threshold of the
inner chamber, and seeking Siegmund's eyes with her own, tries
by a long significant glance to direct his glance to a spot in
the ash-tree. The sword-motif, distinct and sharp, accompanies her
look. Hunding, becoming aware of her lingering, with a peremptory
gesture orders her again to be gone; and gathering up his own armour,
with a warning to the Wölfing that on the morrow he will strike
home,--let him have a care!--withdraws, audibly bolting the door
behind him.
Left alone, Siegmund lies down beside the dying fire. To remove
himself during the night as far as possible from Hunding's reach
is not the solution suggesting itself naturally to him. Yet there
he stands, pledged to meet an enemy, and not a weapon to his hand
of offence or defence. The difficulty of his position is certainly
as great as could be, and, reaching the full consciousness of it, he
recalls to mind that his father had promised him a sword, which he
should find in the hour of his greatest need. "Unarmed I am fallen
in the house of the enemy; here I rest, devoted to his vengeance.
A woman I have seen, gloriously fair.... She to whom my longing
draws me, who with a rapturous charm constrains me, is held in
thraldom by the man who mocks my unarmed condition...." Could need,
indeed, be greater? With the whole strength of that need, in a
cry, long, urgent, fit to pierce the walls of Walhalla, he calls
upon his father for the promised sword: "Wälse! Wälse! Where is
your sword?..."
A flame leaps from the embers and illuminates the ash-tree, bringing
into view, at the spot Sieglinde had indicated to him with her
eyes, a sword-hilt. But though his eyes are caught by the glitter,
he does not recognise it for what it is; he watches it, without
moving, as it shines in the firelight, and, lover-like, soon lapsing
into undivided dreaming of the "flower-fair woman," plays tenderly
with the conceit of the gleam on the ash-tree being the trace of
her last bright glance. Forgetting his swordlessness and altogether
unpromising plight, he goes on weaving poetry about her until the
fire is quite out and he so nearly dozes that when a white form
comes gliding through the door bolted by Hunding, he does not stir
until addressed: "Guest, are you asleep?"
Sieglinde has mixed narcotic herbs in her husband's drink, and
bids the stranger make use of the night to provide for his safety.
"Let me advise you of a weapon.... Oh, might you obtain it! The
most splendid of heroes I must call you, for it is destined to
the strongest alone." And she relates how at the marriage-feast
of Hunding, while the men drank, and the woman who "unconsulted
had been offered him for wife by ignoble traffickers" sat sadly
apart, a stranger appeared, an elderly man in grey garb, whose
hat-brim concealed one of his eyes. But the brilliant beam of the
other eye created terror in the bystanders,--all save herself, in
whom it aroused an aching longing, sorrow and comfort in equal
measure. The sword in his hand he swung, and drove into the ash-tree
up to the hilt, leaving it there, a prize to whomsoever should
be able to draw it out. The men present had all made the essay
in vain; guests coming and going since then had tried, equally
without success. "There in silence waits the sword." There in the
ash-tree. "Then I knew," Sieglinde concludes, "who it was had come
to me in my sorrow. I know, too, who it is alone can conquer the
sword. Oh, might I find him here and now, that friend; might he,
from the unknown, come to me, most wretched of women! All I have
ever suffered of cruel woe, all the shame and indignity under which
I have bowed,--sweetest amends would be made for it all! All I ever
lost, all I ever mourned, I should have recovered it all,--if I
might find that supreme friend, if my arm might clasp that hero!"
Siegmund, to whom it could not occur for the fraction of a second
to doubt his strength to draw any sword from any tree, at these
words catches her impetuously to his breast: "The friend now clasps
you, fairest of women, for whom weapon and woman were meant! Hot
in my breast burns the oath which, noble one, weds me to you!"
and, in her very strain: "All I ever yearned for, I met in you!
In you I found all I ever lacked. If you suffered ignominy and I
endured pain, if I was outlawed and you were dishonoured, a joyful
revenge now calls to us happy ones! I laugh aloud in a holy elation,
as I hold you, radiant one, embraced, as I feel the throbbing of
your heart!"
The great door of the hall, silently, without apparent reason,
swings wide open, like a great curious eye unclosing to watch this
beautiful marvel of their love, expanded so suddenly, like a huge
aloe-flower. It lets in a flood of moonlight, and the glimmering
vision of the vapourous green-lit nocturnal Spring-world. "Who
went out?... Who came in?" cries Sieglinde, starting in alarm.
"No one went," Siegmund reassures her, "but some one came: See,
the Spring laughing in the room!" And he pours forth poetry of
adorable inspiration, in explanation of the singular action of
the door: Spring was outside, and Love, his sister, inside; Spring
burst open the severing door, and now, brother and sister, Love
and the Spring, are met!
It is touching, the capacity for happiness the two have accumulated
in the long, thwarted years. An ecstatic joy marks this hour of
forgetting all the world outside themselves; the love-music is
all of a fine free sustained rapture. One poignant and subtle and
profound thing she says to him: "Foreign and unrelated to me seemed
until now everything I saw, hostile everything which approached
me. As if I had never known them were always the things that came
to me.... But you I knew at once, clearly and distinctly; my eye
no sooner beheld you, than you belonged to me; and all that lay
concealed within my breast, the thing which I verily am, bright
as the day it rose to the surface; like a ringing sound it smote
my ear, when in the cold lonesome strange world for the first time
I beheld my Friend!"
Seated in the light of the full moon, they have freedom at last
each to pore over the other's winning beauty. She is struck, fondly
peering into his features, with the sense of having seen him before;
and trying to think when and where reaches the assurance that it was
on the surface of the pool which reflected her own image. Again,
when he speaks, she is struck by the assurance that she has heard his
voice before. She thinks, for a moment, that it was in childhood,...
but corrects the impression by a second: she has heard it recently,
when the echo in the woods gave back her own voice. His luminous
eyes she has seen before: thus shone the glance of the grey guest
at the wedding-feast, whom his daughter recognised by that token.
Earnestly she asks this other guest: "Is your name in very truth
Wehwalt?" "That is no longer my name since you love me!" he replies
exuberantly, "I command now the sublimest joys!... Do you call me
as you wish me to be called: I will take my name from you!" "And
was your father indeed Wolf?" "A Wolf he was to cowardly foxes.
But he whose eye shone with as proud an effulgence as, Glorious One,
does yours, Wälse was his name!" Beside herself with joy, Sieglinde
springs up: "If Wälse was your father--if you are a Wälsung, for
you it was he drove his sword into the tree-trunk. Let me give
you the name by which I love you: Siegmund shall you be called!"
Siegmund leaps to seize the sword-handle: "Siegmund is my name,
and Siegmund am I! (_Sieg_: victory.) Let this sword bear witness,
which fearlessly I seize! Wälse promised me that I should find it
in my greatest need. I grasp it now...." Very characteristically,
this greatest need, as he feels it, is not the need of a weapon with
which to defend his life against Hunding; it is, in his soaring
words: "Highest need of a holiest love, devouring need of a love
full of longing, burns bright in my breast, drives me onward to
deeds and to death.... Nothung! Nothung! So do I name you, sword!
(_Noth_: need. _Nothung_: sword-in-need.) Nothung! Nothung! Out
of the scabbard, to me!" With a mighty tug he draws it forth and
holds it before the marvelling eyes of Sieglinde: "Siegmund the
Wälsung stands before you, woman! As a wedding-gift he brings you
this sword. Thus he wooes the fairest of women; from the enemy's
house thus he leads you forth. Far from here follow him now, out
in the laughing house of the Spring. There Nothung, the sword,
shall protect you, when Siegmund lies overthrown, in the power of
love!" "If your are Siegmund," cries the woman, "I am Sieglinde,
who have so longed for you! Your own sister you have won at the same
time as the sword!" Siegmund is given no pause by this revelation.
At the realisation of this double dearness, the joy flares all
the higher of the lawless pupil of Wotan. "Bride and sister are
you to your brother. Let the blood of the Wälsungen flourish!"
And with arms entertwined, forth they take their madly exulting
hearts out into the "laughing house of the Spring."