"Ah, let no craven awake me!" she cries. "Surround me with horrors, with fires that shall fright: that none but the most fearless of heroes may find me here on the fell!"
Wotan accedes to her petition. He kisses her on both eyes and lays her unconscious, asleep, in the shade of a broad-branching fir tree. Then,—
"Appear! Come, waving fire,
And wind thee in flames round the fell!
Loge, Loge, appear!"
A sea of flames encircles the spot, and Wotan proclaims:
"He who my spear-point's
Sharpness feareth
Shall cross not this flaming fire!"
Alone, under her long steel shield, sleeps the Valkyrie.
287. Siegfried. The drama of Siegfried opens in the cavern of Mime, in the forest "far to the east" to which Sieglinde had fled. Mime, the dwarf, is he whom erstwhile his Nibelung brother, Alberich, then lord of the Ring, had held in thrall at the bottom of the Rhine. Some years before the events represented in this play, the dwarf had found Sieglinde dying in the woods, and had received from her Siegfried, her new-born son, and with him the pieces of Siegmund's broken sword, Nothung.
Young Siegfried, noble, proud, and strong, has been nurtured in ignorance of his lineage and destiny, as Mime's son. But of that lineage and destiny the cunning dwarf is well aware; and while he trains Siegfried to doughty deeds, he ceaselessly forges at the splinters of the sword, hoping to reweld them himself and through Siegfried's might to win victory over Fafner, the present lord of the Ring, and so achieve unmeasured wealth and the mastery of the world. But Siegfried despises his foster-father and seeks ever to discover the story of his own descent. The attempts of Mime to shape anew the pieces of Nothung fail; and he daily forges other swords, which Siegfried scorns and breaks at the first trial. In the course of time, however, there comes to Mime's cave a "Wanderer"—it is Wotan himself—and tells the dwarf that only one, a man who knows not fear, can remake the all-conquering sword. He tells him, too, of the mighty spear, fashioned of the world ash tree's hallowed branches, with which he, Wotan, rules the earth. But no word he says of the doom that is to befall that spear at the blow of the conquering sword,—the doom, forsooth, of the gods themselves.
Mime, after trying in vain to arouse in Siegfried the sense of fear, suggests to the youth that he try to reforge Nothung. Siegfried seizes the splinters, pounds them, and files them to powder; melts them over the charcoal of the ash tree's stem, and, singing at his work, refashions the sword. While this is doing, through the pauses of Siegfried's song can be heard the voice of Mime, muttering: "The sword will be forged ... and Fafner vanquished.... When Siegfried has slain that dragon ... he will be athirst.... I will brew him a drink.... One drop will lay him in sleep.... With the sword that he forges I'll kill him.... Mine, then, the Ring and the hoard!"