THE WALKÜRES’ ROCK ONCE MORE
As afternoon darkened into evening Brünnhilde sat on her high rock
looking at the Ring on her finger with loving eyes, and thinking
tenderly of the hero who had placed it there, and who was perhaps, even
then, leaving the paths of men to come to her side once more.
Suddenly a flash of lightning appeared across the sky and a clap of
thunder sounded far away. Strange sounds broke the stillness, sounds
well remembered by her: the hoofs of wind-horses speeding through the
clouds, the whistling of rushing blasts, the ring of steel armor.
Starting up in wild excitement, she saw a black thunder-cloud rushing
towards the rock.
“Brünnhilde! Sister! Are you asleep or awake?” called the clear voice
of one of the warrior goddesses, as a war-horse sprang to earth from
the midst of the clouds.
With a cry of joy Brünnhilde ran to meet the Walküre, saying:
“Waltraute, truest sister, welcome!” and asking tenderly about the rest
of the maidens and her father Wotan.
But Waltraute was sad and anxious, and seemed in fearful haste. She
interrupted Brünnhilde’s passionate description of her hero and her
happiness in his love by sad words of the gloom that reigned in
Walhalla. She told the story of the hewing of the World-Ash, the fagots
piled high about the great palace; of the gods and heroes assembled in
awe. She spoke of Wotan sitting in silence holding his broken spear in
his hand.
She said that once, and once only, had he spoken, and that he had then
said: “When the Rhine daughters gain from Brünnhilde the Ring the world
will be released from the power of the spell.”
Waltraute begged Brünnhilde to give her the Ring, so that she,
Waltraute, might carry it to the Rhine Maidens.
“If you wish, you may ward off the shadow of the gods,” said the
Walküre, kneeling at her sister’s feet. But Brünnhilde looked at her as
though in a trance.
“Like a sorrowful dream it seems—this that you tell me. I do not
understand it. I am no longer one of the gods. You, pale sister—what
have you to do with me?”
Passionately, Waltraute asked for the Ring which she wore, but
Brünnhilde replied that it was Siegfried’s love-gift, and that she
would never give it up. Again Waltraute besought her, for the sake of
the gods, the bright mighty gods, who were going to destruction, to
give up the magic circlet.
Brünnhilde answered quietly that she prized love more than the welfare
of all the gods, and that the Ring was dearer to her than the palace of
Walhalla; and she bade Waltraute be gone, refusing once for all to give
up Siegfried’s gift.
“Woe! woe!” wailed the Walküre, speeding wildly away. “Woe for you,
sister! Woe for the gods in Walhalla! Woe!”
She was gone, amid thunder and rushing winds.
Sitting again on the rock alone, Brünnhilde looked down to where the
guarding fire-circle burned brighter and brighter. A horn-call sounded
in the distance.
“Siegfried!” cried Brünnhilde, rushing forward.
But who was that who sprang from out the fire and stood before her? Not
Siegfried, surely, but some stranger—a stranger with face partly masked
by a curious helmet of some sort.
No wonder that she did not recognize her hero in the man before her,
who, by the aid of the Tarnhelm, bore the semblance of Gunther, the
Gibichung. He told her that he had come to take her away with him and
marry her; and when she ordered him to yield before the strength of the
mighty Ring on her finger, he caught her hand and tore the circlet from
it, placing it on his own.
“Now yield to me! You must be my wife,” he commanded; and, weak and
powerless, Brünnhilde was conquered and led away by the warrior, who
was none other than Siegfried—had she but known it!—Siegfried, her
hero, who did not remember her at all, and only looked upon her as the
bride of his brother-hero Gunther, the bride that must be delivered
safely into the real Gibichung’s hand.
[Illustration: BRÜNNHILDE AND SIEGFRIED]
For Siegfried cared nothing for her himself, and thought only of
the fair maiden down in the great hall built upon the shore of the
Rhine—Gutrune, the lady of the Gibichungs.
And that was how the Nibelung’s spell again brought sorrow and misery
to the wearer of the Rhinegold’s Ring.
[Music: Tarnhelm Motif]
[Music: Gutrune Motif]
[Music: Motif of Revenge]