In my interpretation Siegfried’s fearlessness, heroism, and status as a potentially free redeemer, are the direct product of Brünnhilde knowing for him what he doesn’t consciously know, his true identity, prehistory, and fated destiny, all grounded in Wotan. This is the ultimate, allegorical meaning of the love they share, and the authentic explanation of what many, including Kitcher and Schacht, and even Scruton, seem to find puzzling or even disturbing about Siegfried.
One final example of their inattention to motival cross-references in the Ring, which would have been invaluable in interpreting the motives behind Siegfried’s and Brünnhilde’s words and actions, will suffice. Referencing the moment in Siegfried Act Three, Scene Three in which Brünnhilde tells Siegfried something he doesn’t understand, that Brünnhilde felt what Wotan thought (what Wotan confessed to her), and that what Wotan thought was just her love for Siegfried, Kitcher and Schacht say that:
“She [Brünnhilde] takes him [Siegfried] to be supremely noble and therefore to be loved and cherished - as are all noble things, but beyond all others. So she articulates what she takes to be ‘Wotan’s thought’ - a thought she was previously unable to express but is now seen as asserting the priority of the heroic and worthy, whose epitome she takes to be the youth before her.” [P. 160]
In my allegorical reading, Wotan’s confession (God’s Word) of his desperate need for a free hero (savior/redeemer) was the seed the god planted in the womb of his wishes Brünnhilde, giving metaphysical (or if you will, virgin) birth to Siegfried via Brünnhilde, Siegfried’s surrogate mother. She not only named Siegfried (when we would otherwise have expected his natural birth mother Sieglinde to do so) but knew Siegfried’s mother Sieglinde was pregnant with Siegfried when Sieglinde didn’t know. Lacking any sense of the allegorical meaning at work in Brünnhilde’s remarks to Siegfried with their motival accompaniment, which convey to him that he, and their love, are in effect the product of Wotan’s confession, Kitcher and Schacht reduce Brünnhilde’s profound comments to Siegfried to meaningless generalities about some vague notion of Siegfried’s nobility, heroism, and worthiness, which Wotan wanted her to respect and love. They reduce to bland nothingness what for Wagner was sharply defined and profoundly meaningful, saying (absurdly in light of the fact that Wotan made Brünnhilde, his “Will,” his other half, the repository for his confession) that Brünnhilde articulates to Siegfried “… what she takes to be ‘Wotan’s thought’.” Brünnhilde doesn’t “take” anything to be Wotan’s thought: she, in her relationship to Wotan’s hoped for savior Siegfried, is the embodiment, the soul, the innermost feeling, the music of Wotan’s thought. Here’s the passage with its motival component:
“(H151 = #141:) I loved you always: to me alone was Wotan’s thought revealed. The thought which I could never name; (H82b = #83:) the thought I did not think but only felt; the thought for which I fought; (H99 variant = #96 variant:) did battle and have striven; for which I flouted him who thought it; (H97 variant = #94 variant:) for which I atoned, incurring chastisement, because, not thinking, (H99B = #96b:) I only felt it! Because that (H143 = #134:) thought, - could you only guess it! - was but my love for you.”
Wotan’s thought (after his failure to produce a truly free social revolutionary in Siegmund, who should have redeemed the gods from Alberich’s Ring Curse by transforming corrupt society into one of love and justice), the essential content of his confession to Brünnhilde, was that he needed
