The Wagnerian Romances

by Gertrude Hall Brownell

Siegfried turns away, untroubled, and descends further into the narrow valley. But their words have not quite glanced off him. "Why do I suffer such a mean report of myself? Shall I lend myself to gibes of the sort? If they should come again to the water's edge, the ring they might have!" Too large to feel demeaned by an inconsistency, he shouts to them: "Hey, you lively water-beauties! Come quickly! I make you a gift of the ring!" Taking it off, he holds it toward them. This is the point in his fortunes where we perceive the working of Siegfried's fate. If the nymphs, as one would have felt safe in counting upon their doing, had risen and caught the Ring from him with a laugh louder than any before, all might have been well. Hagen would have had nothing to gain by killing him. But the curse which doomed the owner of the Ring to a bloody end would not have it so. It had been crippled, it is true, against the noble one; it had failed to make him suspicious, sad, and careful. But his violent death we see provided for when, by what seems the merest hazard, his offer of the Ring to the Rhine-maidens is not accepted on the expected terms. The sisters rise to his call, but instead of faces dancing with laughter they show him grave and warning countenances. Their subaqueous deliberations have resulted in a most ill-inspired change of tactics. Instead of snatching at the proffered Ring and glad to have it, they represent to Siegfried that he will be under an obligation to them for ridding him of it. His mood of giving is changed by a threat into one of refusal. "Keep it, hero, and guard it with care, until you become aware of the evil fate you are cherishing under its shape. Then you will be glad if we will deliver you from the curse!" He slips back the Ring on his finger and bids them tell what they know. "Siegfried! We know of evil threatening you! To your danger you retain the Ring! Out of the Rhine-gold it was forged; he who shaped it and miserably lost it, placed a curse upon it long ago, that it should bring death upon him who wore it. As you slew the dragon, even so shall you be slain, and this very day, of this we warn you, unless you give us the Ring to bury in the deep Rhine; its water alone can allay the curse!" "You artful ladies," the hero shakes his head, "let be that policy! If I hardly trusted your flatteries, your attempt to alarm me deceives me still less...." When more impressively still they reiterate their warning, protesting their truth, urging the irresistible strength of the curse woven by the Norns into the coil of the eternal law, he answers, and the nature against which the curse had so long been of no effect shows brightly forth in the brief tirade: "My sword once cleft asunder a spear. The eternal coil of the law, whatever wild curses they have woven into it, the Norns shall see cut through by Nothung. A dragon once upon a time did of a truth warn me of the curse, but he could not teach me to fear! Though the whole world might be gained to me by a ring, for love I would willingly cede it; you should have it if you gave me delight. But if you threaten me in life and limb, though the ring should not enclose the worth of a finger, not by any force could you get it from me! For life and limb, if I must live loveless and a slave to fear,—life and limb, look you, like this I cast them far away from me!" He takes up and flings a clod of earth over his shoulder. The Rhine-daughters in agitation press him still for a moment with warnings; but, realising the futility of these, with the prophecy: "A proud woman will this very day inherit of you; she will lend a more heedful ear to our warning!" they finally swim away, as they announce: "To her! To her! To her!"

Their singing floats back, dying away, a long time after they have taken their leave; Siefgried stands watching them out of sight, amused: "In water as on land I have now learned the ways of women; if a man resist their cajoling, they try threats with him; if he boldly brave these, let him look for scorn and reproaches! And yet—were it not for my truth to Gutrune, one of those dainty water-women I should have liked to tame!"

The horns of the hunting-party are heard approaching. Siegfried shouts in answer to their shouts. When Hagen and Gunther come in sight, he calls to them to join him down there where it is fresh and cool. The company with their freight of game descend into the shady gorge, to camp for an hour. The wine-skins and drink-horns are passed. Siegfried, questioned by Hagen of his fortune at the chase, jestingly gives his account: "I came forth for forest-hunting, but water-game was all that presented itself. Had I had a mind to it, three wild water-birds I might have caught for you, who sang to me, there on the Rhine, that I should be slain to-day!" Never had he spoken with a more unclouded brow. Gunther starts at his words and glances apprehensively at Hagen. Siegfried stretches out contentedly between them, the ample sunshine in his blood, and remembers that he is thirsty. Hagen treats the evil prophecy as lightly as does Siegfried himself. In not unnatural sequence to Siegfried's reference to the water-birds, he remarks: "I have heard it reported, Siegfried, that you understand the language of the birds. Is it true?" "I have not heeded their babble this many a day—" Siegfried is saying, when Gunther's heavy and preoccupied mien is borne upon him; he breaks off to reach him his drink-horn, cheerily rallying him: "Drink, Gunther, drink! Your brother brings it to you!" Gunther, oppressed by his dark doubt of Siegfried, is not prompt in accepting the proffered cup. His reply obscurely conveys his sense of some failure in their good-fellowship. Siegfried takes it up merely to turn into occasion for one of his cordial laughs. "You over-cheerful hero!" sighs Gunther. Something is wrong, Siegfried cannot fail to see. He drops privately to Hagen his interpretation of the friend's gloom: "Brünnhilde is giving him trouble?" "If he understood her as well as you understand the song of the birds!" Siegfried has an inspiration. Those last words of Hagen's contain the germ of it. "Hei! Gunther!" he calls to the blood-brother, who appears so sorely in need of cheering: "You melancholy fellow! If you will thank me for it, I will sing you tales from the days of my youth!"

Gunther's reply is politely encouraging. Hagen joins his invitation to the half-brother's. The listeners place themselves at ease on the ground about the narrator, seated in their midst on a mossy stump. Then Siegfried, with his beautiful, bottomless zest in life, recounts in vivid running sketches the story we know. One after the other the familiar motifs pass in review. From them alone one could reconstruct the tale. Of his childhood in Mime's cave, the forging of Nothung, the slaying of the dragon. Of the wonder worked by the drop of dragon's blood on the tongue, the little bird's good counsel by which he won Tarnhelm and Ring, the same bird's warning upon which he slew Mime. At this point, when we are wondering how, with Brünnhilde wiped from his memory, he can proceed, Hagen hands him a horn filled with wine, in which he has been seen expressing the juice of an herb; this, the Nibelung's son, wise in the virtues of simples, tells him, will sharpen his memory and bring close remote events.

Siegfried takes the cup, but for a moment does not taste it, absorbed, as is evident, in the effort to remember what came right after the point in his story at which he just broke off. The forgetfulness-motif suggests his baffled groping. Mechanically he sets the horn to his lips—a strain of the tenderest and most ecstatic of the Siegfried-Brünnhilde love-music marks the first effect of the draught which dissolves the mists obscuring memory,—followed close by the whole slowly unwinding Brünnhilde-motif. We feel as if we had suddenly, with Siegfried, waked from a bad dream. We take a trembling breath of relief at the weight removed from our heart.

A light of fixed joy grows and grows in Siegfried's face, as upon this recovering of his true identity he takes up his story again: "Wistfully I listened for the bird in the tree-tops. He sat there still, and sang; 'Hei, Siegfried has slain the wicked dwarf! I have in mind for him now the most glorious mate! On a high rock she sleeps, a wall of flame surrounds her abode. If he should push through the fire, if he should waken the bride, then were Brünnhilde his own!'" Gunther hears in growing amazement. "Straightway, unhesitating, I hastened forth. I reached the fire-girt rock. I crossed the flaming barrier, and found in reward"—the memory holds his breath suspended—a beautiful woman, asleep in a suit of gleaming armour. I loosed the helmet from the glorious head; audaciously with a kiss I waked the maid.... Oh, with what ardour did then the arm of the lovely Brünnhilde enfold me!"

Gunther springs up in horrified comprehension. Two ravens at this moment make sudden interruption, flying out of a tree and wheeling above Siegfried's head. He starts up, in natural interest at the apparition of Wotan's messengers. "Can you understand, too, the croaking of these ravens?" sneers Hagen. Siegfried, looking after the black birds as they bend their flight Rhine-wards, turns his back to the questioner. "They bid me take vengeance!" Hagen grimly interprets for himself, and with a quick thrust drives his spear through Siegfried's body, from the back. Too late Gunther holds his arm and the retainers spring to prevent him. Siegfried's eyes flash wildly about for a weapon. He snatches up his great shield and lifts it aloft to crush the perfidious enemy,—but his strength fails, the shield drops, and he falls crashing backwards upon it.

"Hagen, what have you done?" comes accusingly from Gunther and the men-of-arms, while a shudder runs through the assembly, and, as one feels at the music's intimation, through the very heart of nature. "Taken vengeance of perjury!" Hagen coldly replies, and, turning from the group gathered around the dying hero, slowly disappears in the gathering dusk. Gunther, seized with remorseful anguish, bends over the wounded brother. Two of the company, aiding his effort to rise, support him. It is clear at once that immediate surroundings and recent events are blotted from his ken by the brighter light of a remembered scene, filling the wide-open, over-brilliant Wälsung-eyes. The music lets us into the secret first of what it is—so absorbingly present to him in this last hour: the moment marvellous among all in his existence, when he had seen the sleeping Brünnhilde return to life. It is as if it were all happening a second time, she having mysteriously since that first awakening been again sunk into sleep, from which he must now again recall her: "Brünnhilde, sacred bride... awake!... Open your eyes.... Who sealed you again in sleep?... Who bound you in joyless slumber? The Awakener is come. He kisses you awake.... He rends the confining bands... whereupon breaks forth upon him the light of Brünnhilde's smile!... Oh, that eye, henceforth to close no more!... Oh, the happy heaving of that breath!... Sweetest languor, blissful darkness.... Brünnhilde welcomes me to her!..."

So he dies as he had lived, joyous and unafraid, the curse, while having its way with him to the extent of securing his destruction, crippled as ever before, when the death by which it would punish is embraced like a bride.

For a long moment all stand motionless and heavily silent. It really seems impossible that a spear-thrust could extinguish that glowing,—that superabundant,—that splendid life. Night deepens. At a sign from Gunther, the men lift the dead, laid upon his shield, to their shoulders, and in solemn procession start upon the rocky path homeward.