either is or becomes a Nibelung. [364W-{6-8/48} The Wibelungen – Revised summer of 1849: PW Vol. VII, p. 263]
[365W-{6-8/48} The Wibelungen – Revised summer of 1849: PW Vol. VII, p. 266-267]
[P. 266] {FEUER} “Religion and Saga are the pregnant products of the people’s insight into the nature of things and men. From of old the Folk has had the inimitable faculty of seizing its own essence according to the Generic idea, and plainly reproducing it in plastic personification. The Gods and Heroes of its religion and saga are the concrete personalities in which the Spirit of the Folk portrays its essence to itself: however sharp the individuality of these personages, their content (Inhalt) is of most universal, wide-embracing type, and therefore lends these shapes a strangely lasting lease [P. 267] of life.” [365W-{6-8/48} The Wibelungen – Revised summer of 1849: PW Vol. VII, p. 266-267]
[366W-{6-8/48} The Wibelungen – Revised summer of 1849: PW Vol. VII, p. 269]
[P. 269] {FEUER} “… the poetic literature of the Hohenstaufen period, where we may plainly distinguish in the Christian-chivalrous poems the Welfian element become at last a churchly one, in the newly-furbished Nibelungenlieder that utterly contrasting Wibelungian principle with its often still ur-pagan cut.” [366W-{6-8/48} The Wibelungen – Revised summer of 1849: PW Vol. VII, p. 269]
[367W-{6-8/48} The Wibelungen – Revised summer of 1849: PW Vol. VII, p. 271]
[P. 271] {FEUER} “… we may call everything related hereto the ‘Welfic’ principle … in opposition to that of the Wibelungen, which developed into nothing less than a claim to world-dominion.” [367W-{6-8/48} The Wibelungen – Revised summer of 1849: PW Vol. VII, p. 271]
[368W-{6-8/48} The Wibelungen – Revised summer of 1849: PW Vol. VII, p. 275]
[P. 275] {FEUER} “The quintessence of this constant motion, thus of Life, at last in ‘Wuotan’ (Zeus) found expression as the chiefest God, the Father and Pervader of the All. Though his nature marked him as the highest god, and as such he needs must take the place of father to the other deities, yet was he nowise an historically older god, but sprang into existence from man’s later, higher consciousness of self; consequently he is more abstract than the older Nature-god, whilst the latter is more corporeal and, so to phrase it, more personally inborn in man.” [368W-{6-8/48} The Wibelungen – Revised summer of 1849: PW Vol. VII, p. 275]
[369W-{6-8/48} The Wibelungen – Revised summer of 1849: PW Vol. VII, p. 276]
[P. 276] {FEUER} “When Light vanquished Darkness, when Siegfried slew the Nibelungen-dragon, he further won as victor’s spoil the Nibelungen-hoard it guarded. But the possession of this Hoard – whose properties increase his might beyond all measure, since he thereby rules the Nibelungen – is also reason of his death: for the dragon’s heir now plots to win it back. This heir despatches him by stealth, as night the day, and drags him down into the gloomy realm of Death:
