Before the curtain rises on the Valkyries, let us see what has happened since it fell on The Rhine Gold.The persons of the drama will tell us presently; but as we probably do not understand German, that may not help us.
Wotan is still ruling the world in glory from his giantbuilt castle with his wife Fricka.But he has no security for the continuance of his reign, since Alberic may at any moment contrive to recover the ring, the full power of which he can wield because he has forsworn love.Such forswearing is not possible to Wotan: love, though not his highest need, is a higher than gold: otherwise he would be no god.Besides, as we have seen, his power has been established in the world by and as a system of laws enforced by penalties.These he must consent to be bound by himself; for a god who broke his own laws would betray the fact that legality and conformity are not the highest rule of conduct--a discovery fatal to his supremacy as Pontiff and Lawgiver.Hence "he may not wrest the ring unlawfully from Fafnir, even if he could bring himself to forswear love.
In this insecurity he has hit on the idea of forming a heroic bodyguard.He has trained his love children as war-maidens (Valkyries) whose duty it is to sweep through battle-fields and bear away to Valhalla the souls of the bravest who fall there.
Thus reinforced by a host of warriors, he has thoroughly indoctrinated them, Loki helping him as dialectician-in-chief, with the conventional system of law and duty, supernatural religion and self-sacrificing idealism, which they believe to be the essence of his godhood, but which is really only the machinery of the love of necessary power which is his mortal weakness.This process secures their fanatical devotion to his system of government, but he knows perfectly well that such systems, in spite of their moral pretensions, serve selfish and ambitious tyrants better than benevolent despots, and that, if once Alberic gets the ring back, he will easily out-Valhalla Valhalla, if not buy it over as a going concern.The only chance of permanent security, then, is the appearance in the world of a hero who, without any illicit prompting from Wotan, will destroy Alberic and wrest the ring from Fafnir.There will then, he believes, be no further cause for anxiety, since he does not yet conceive Heroism as a force hostile to Godhead.In his longing for a rescuer, it does not occur to him that when the Hero comes, his first exploit must be to sweep the gods and their ordinances from the path of the heroic will.
Indeed, he feels that in his own Godhead is the germ of such Heroism, and that from himself the Hero must spring.He takes to wandering, mostly in search of love, from Fricka and Valhalla.He seeks the First Mother; and through her womb, eternally fertile, the inner true thought that made him first a god is reborn as his daughter, uncorrupted by his ambition, unfettered by his machinery of power and his alliances with Fricka and Loki.This daughter, the Valkyrie Brynhild, is his true will, his real self, (as he thinks): to her he may say what he must not say to anyone, since in speaking to her he but speaks to himself."Was Keinem in Worten unausgesprochen," he says to her, "bleib es ewig: mit mir nur rath' ich, red' ich zu dir."But from Brynhild no hero can spring until there is a man of Wotan's race to breed with her.Wotan wanders further; and a mortal woman bears him twins: a son and a daughter.He separates them by letting the girl fall into the hands of a forest tribe which in due time gives her as a wife to a fierce chief, one Hunding.With the son he himself leads the life of a wolf, and teaches him the only power a god can teach, the power of doing without happiness.When he has given him this terrible training, he abandons him, and goes to the bridal feast of his daughter Sieglinda and Hunding.In the blue cloak of the wanderer, wearing the broad hat that flaps over the socket of his forfeited eye, he appears in Hunding's house, the middle pillar of which is a mighty tree.Into that tree, without a word, he strikes a sword up to the hilt, so that only the might of a hero can withdraw it.Then he goes out as silently as he came, blind to the truth that no weapon from the armory of Godhead can serve the turn of the true Human Hero.Neither Hunding nor any of his guests can move the sword; and there it stays awaiting the destined hand.
That is the history of the generations between The Rhine Gold and The Valkyries.
The First ActThis time, as we sit looking expectantly at the curtain, we hear, not the deep booming of the Rhine, but the patter of a forest downpour, accompanied by the mutter of a storm which soon gathers into a roar and culminates in crashing thunderbolts.As it passes off, the curtain rises; and there is no mistaking whose forest habitation we are in; for the central pillar is a mighty tree, and the place fit for the dwelling of a fierce chief.The door opens: and an exhausted man reels in: an adept from the school of unhappiness.Sieglinda finds him lying on the hearth.
He explains that he has been in a fight; that his weapons not being as strong as his arms, were broken; and that he had to fly.
He desires some drink and a moment's rest; then he will go; for he is an unlucky person, and does not want to bring his ill-luck on the woman who is succoring him.But she, it appears, is also unhappy; and a strong sympathy springs up between them.When her husband arrives, he observes not only this sympathy, but a resemblance between them, a gleam of the snake in their eyes.