armed; (#4:) shrewd and subtle must be your approach when you call the thief to account (:#4) (#16?:) and make him give back the red trinket, (with warmth) the gold, to the daughters of the Rhine (:#16?): (#12) for that is what they beg of you.
Wotan: (#16?:) The daughters of the Rhine (:#16)? What use is such advice to me?
Fricka: (#4:) Of the watery brood I’d rather not know; for many a man – to my grief (:#4)! – they have lewdly lured to their watery lair. (#4)
Froh, accompanied by #37, provides us with one of the most astute observations in the entire Ring when he suggests that since Alberich has already sacrificed love in order to win the Ring, he’s paid a price that a thief who takes the Ring from him presumably won’t have to pay. Alberich in effect becomes here a symbol for the martyrdom which is the price Wotan will ultimately call upon his new race of Waelsung heroes to pay, unwittingly, in order that they may redeem the gods from having to pay this price. Wotan will be asking his Waelsung heroes to do what the gods cannot do, break their own law, their own prohibition on knowledge of the truth, and risk suffering from the curse Alberich will eventually place on his Ring, in order to spare the gods this fate. This notion shouldn’t shock Christians: this is after all what God-the-Father expects of his son, the lord and savior Jesus Christ, martyrdom for the sake of humanity, and it is well known that Wagner’s characterization of Siegfried, who will ultimately represent Wotan’s best hope for redemption of gods and world from Alberich’s curse, is at least partly based on Christ the savior.
It is Loge of course who suggests that the gods dispossess Alberich of his Ring, and take advantage of his sacrifice, through theft. Loge’s cunning here becomes a model for the Waelsung heroes to whom Wotan will look - once he has forcibly stolen the Ring from Alberich - to take possession of Alberich’s Ring so that Alberich can never get it back and restore his lost power. Were Alberich to restore his lost power, this would bring about the destruction of the gods (i.e., the destruction of religious belief). Loge, the archetypal artist-hero, is contemplating nothing less than that religious man, with the aid of his cunning, self-deception, will take the mind (Alberich and his Ring) prisoner. They will capture Alberich and his Ring in order that they can convert the Ring’s power to subjective employment, i.e., to sustain the gods’ rule through illusion in Valhalla, through employment, in other words, of the imagination in art’s service, rather than for the sake of objective knowledge. For religious belief (Valhalla: #20a) is, after all, an expression of the Ring’s (#19’s) power (the power of the mind), but in this case tempered by subjective feeling (love). This simple fact will come to our aid again and again in our attempts to resolve many of the old conundrums of the Ring.
But Loge adds - accompanied by Woglinde’s Lullabye #4 - that the gods must be shrewd and subtle if they hope to make the thief Alberich give his Ring back to the Rhinedaughters. Wotan asks the first of his great questions in the Ring when he asks Loge what “use” giving the Ring back to the Rhinedaughters would be. Wotan’s question recalls Alberich, who could not for the life of him grasp what “use” the Rhinedaughters’ song and dance in aesthetic celebration of the Rhinegold
