Fafner: Freia may live in peace with you; an easier payment I’ve found as ransom [“Loesung”]: (#27:; #26a:) we uncouth giants will be content (:#27; :#26a) with the Nibelung’s bright red gold.
Wotan: Are you out of your minds? What I myself do not own you expect me to give to you shameless creatures?
Fafner: (#26a:) The stronghold there was hard to build (:#26a); (#20a:) it’s easy for you with your cunning and power to bind the Nibelung fast – which we’ve never achieved in war (:#20a). (#33b)
Wotan: For you should I trouble myself with the dwarf? For you should I capture your foe? Unabashed and over-demanding my debt has made you, you fools.
Leaving for a moment our attempt to explain what Fafner means by his attempt to renegotiate the terms of the contract with Wotan, the first thing we remark in this passage is Fasolt’s surprising acquiescence in his brother’s cynical plan to renounce Freia (goddess of love and immortality) in favor of the power Alberich’s gold can win them. Clearly, the fact that Fafner’s cynicism and egoism is more persuasive to Fasolt, however reluctantly he concurs with Fafner’s view, shows that Fasolt’s love is weaker than Fafner’s desire for self-aggrandizement and immortality. Obviously, in a loveless, material world lacking all transcendent value, all supernatural influence, the self-preservation instinct would always trump any higher ideals such as compassionate love for others. In any case, Fafner’s power of persuasion proves that ultimately Fasolt, like Fafner, is an egoist even in his tender longing for a woman’s love, that in the long run Fasolt prefers self-preservation (whether eternal, or finite, is immaterial here) over love for others. Except that, in this instance, Fafner is making the rather astonishing assertion that one of the powers won by the Rhinegold’s owner will in fact be the immortality which heretofore we had believed could be granted by Freia’s golden apples alone. True, the Ring confers theoretically limitless power over the world, but this power does not necessarily embrace a supernatural power to confer unending life. When we consider that the Ring - construed as a metaphor for the power of the human mind - gave birth to man’s illusion that his life is ruled by supernatural beings, in this instance the gods of Valhalla, and that it is supposed by believers that these beings can confer immortality on chosen mortal heroes, on this view even Freia’s apples of sorrowless youth eternal are merely an illusion.
Clearly, there is more here than would be apparent from a literal reading of this passage. Fafner has said something which at first seems contradictory. How could the giants obtain eternal youth from the Rhinegold, which grants man worldly power, when only divinity, such as the goddess Freia, can grant man true immortality, which by definition is supernatural? Fafner obviously means something else: he prefers whatever reality can give him, over the psychological pleasure which the consolations of illusion can provide. For Fafner, the real trumps any illusory ideal. He would rather obtain a fuller and longer life through objective knowledge and power, than the belief in eternal youth predicated on illusion. This is part of the danger his cynicism presents to the gods, that it is
