Then she, with a joyful cry:
"Oh, child of delight! Oh, glorious hero!
Thou foolish lord of loftiest deeds!
Laughing must I love thee,
Laughing welcome my blindness;
Laughing let us be lost,
With laughter go down to death....
Farewell, Valhalla's light-giving world:
Thy stately towers let fall in dust!
Farewell, O glittering pomp of the gods!
Complete your bliss, eternal host!
Now rend, ye Norns, your rope of runes:
Dusk of Gods in darkness arise;
Night of downfall dawn in mist!"
And thus, turning their backs on Valhalla, and radiant with the light of human love, the twain, laughing, face toward death.
288. The Twilight of the Gods. The play opens with a prelude. By the Valkyrie's rock sit the three Norns and sing of past, present, and future, weaving through the night their rope of runes. As they foretell the burning of Valhalla and the end of the gods, the rope breaks, and the Norns disappear into the earth.
The sun rises, and in the first act of the play Siegfried and Brünnhilde enter from their cave. She sends him forth in quest of heroic adventures in the world, giving him her horse, Grane, and receiving from him the Ring as a pledge of his love.
The scene changes, and we behold the interior of the Gibichungs' hall on the Rhine. Gunther and Gutrune, his sister, are in converse with Hagen, their half brother,—dark and treacherous son of Grimhilde, their mother, and of Alberich the Nibelung, erstwhile owner of the Ring. Hagen alone knows, it would seem, that Siegfried has already ridden through the flames and won Brünnhilde. The others know merely that that hero has slain Fafner and is lord of the Tarnhelm, hoard, and Ring. Hagen, anxious to regain the heritage of the Nibelungs, urges marriage on Gunther, naming Brünnhilde as a fitting bride for him. As, however, Siegfried alone can pass through the fire to come at her, he proposes that Gutrune shall win Siegfried's love and induce him to serve Gunther. Siegfried's horn is heard, and he presently enters and is made welcome. Gutrune, at the instigation of Hagen, brings Siegfried a potion which causes him to love her, and drives clean out of his mind all memory of Brünnhilde. In the madness of his passion for Gutrune, Siegfried swears blood-brotherhood with Gunther, and promises by the aid of the Tarnhelm to make Brünnhilde Gunther's wife, if only in return Gutrune shall be his. The newly sworn "brothers" depart for Brünnhilde's rock.
In the next scene we are again before the home of Brünnhilde. Waltraute, a Valkyrie, comes to beg Brünnhilde to give back the Ring to the Rhine-maidens, and so avert the doom of the gods.
"What, then, aileth the immortals?" cries Brünnhilde in alarm.
"Since Wotan doomed thee, no more hath he sent us to war," replies Waltraute. "No more hath he gathered the souls of the slain about him in Valhalla. Alone he has ridden unceasing through the world. But, one day, home he came bearing his spear all splintered in his hand. Wordless, with a sign he bade Valhalla's heroes hew the world ash tree in pieces and pile it like firewood around the Hall of the Blest. And from that hour silent he sits on his throne, about him the awe-struck gods and heroes, the war-maids cowering at his knees. None tastes the apples of youth. To-day Wotan remembered thee; his eye grew soft and, as dreaming, he spake:
'If once more the daughters of Rhine
Should win from her finger the Ring,
Of the load of the curse
Were the world and immortals made free.'