Loge: (#50:) Let him snatch up the hoard (:#50): look to the ring alone! (#19)
Fasolt: (…) (#19:) Get back! You upstart! The ring is mine: I got it for freia’s glance (:#19). (He tries to grab the ring: they struggle)
Fafner: (#19:) Take your hands off! The ring is mine (:#19). (#16?: Fasolt tears the ring fromFafner’s hand)
Fasolt: I hold it, it’s mine!
Fafner: (preparing to strike him with his stave) Hold it fast or else it may fall! (He fells Fasolt with a single blow; #drumbeat repeated: then wrenches the ring from his dying brother.) (#19:) Now gaze your fill on Freia’s glance: never again will you touch the ring (:#19)! (He puts the ring in the sack, then calmly finishes packing away the rest of the hoard. All the gods look on in horror: solemn silence. (#51)
We could almost call this fratricide the first fruits of the Fall, the first fruits of Alberich’s forging of the Ring and laying a curse on it. We are reminded of Cain’s slaying of Abel in the Biblical Book of Genesis. This is not only an expression of man’s Fall (from grace with Nature) through his acquisition of consciousness (the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge in paradise), but more specifically tells us that the self-preservation instinct is ultimately stronger than the social instinct of love, since here we see Fafner, the incarnation of self-preservation, kill his brother, the amorous Fasolt. But Fasolt had already effectively ceased to exist as an independent representative of love when he allowed Fafner to persuade him to relinquish Freia for the sake of the Nibelung’s gold. Fafner has now, in effect, absorbed his brother, as both are motivated by the same thing, egoism. Fafner’s victory over Fasolt is a dramatization of Feuerbach’s argument, cited previously, that our concern for self is the precondition for, and trumps, our social concern for others, including the amorous and sexual urges, just as it is the precondition for man’s sublime longing for transcendent value and sorrowless youth eternal.
In Fafner’s assumption that his brother Fasolt did not bargain in good faith in seeking possession of Freia, because Fasolt would scarcely have been willing to share her love if the Giants had won her in payment, Fafner cynically points out the egoism hidden within the alleged virtuousness of monogamy, love’s fidelity. The egoistic underside of romantic love is that it is actually another form of possession in the quest for exclusive power, of man’s quest to stake his claim to personal property at the expense of others. The inextricable link of jealousy with romantic love is the undeniable proof that egoism is the root of the exclusivism of romantic love. The insistence on fidelity, the readiness of lovers to fall into vile jealousy, bespeaks the egoistic basis of the dream of
