What here on the Rhine ye have heard!

To Brünnhilde's rock

Go round about.

Yet Loge burns there:

Walhall bid him revisit!

Draweth near in gloom

The dusk of the gods.

Thus, casting my torch,

I kindle Walhalla's towers."

And that is all. Yet the thought lurks always beneath the surface of the tragedy. Wotan, the father and master of the futile and disappearing gods, fell a victim to evil itself, to evil which in the consuming power of flickering fire was its own executioner.