and, pointing to the castle, cries, ‘So gruess ich die Burg, sicher vor Bang und Grau’n!’ “ [870W-{6-8/76} WRR, p. 38-39]
Of course, the preceding extracts reflected Wagner’s viewpoint during the year of the Ring’s premier in 1876. But this notion of Alberich as the original manufacturer of Nothung had long captured Wagner’s imagination. The following extract dates to the genesis of the Ring in 1848:
“The race of Giants, boastful, violent, ur-begotten, is troubled in its savage ease: their monstrous strength, their simple mother-wit, no longer are a match for Alberich’s crafty plans of conquest: alarmed they see the Nibelungen forging wondrous weapons, that one day in the hands of human heroes shall cause the Giants’ downfall.” [375W-{6-8/48} The Nibelungen Myth: PW Vol. VII, p. 301]
Why, one might wonder, would specifically Alberich be the one who manufactured the sword which is the embodiment of Wotan’s hope to restore the innocence and love lost through both his own and Alberich’s actions? The allegorical logic is the following: it is, as Wagner said himself, in a passage oft-cited in this study, only by virtue of man’s loss of innocence, that he has become conscious of that loss and has sought throughout history to restore it.
Wotan will seek various means to redeem the gods from Erda’s prophecy that Alberich’s curse on his Ring will bring about the destruction of the gods. On the one hand, during his sojourn in the womb of the earth with Erda, he plants the seed which gives birth not only to their daughter Bruennhilde, but to Bruennhilde’s eight other Valkyrie sisters. Their sole purpose will be to inspire select heroes to martyr themselves on the battlefield so that they can be resurrected in Valhalla to fight in a final battle against Alberich’s host of night. But the grand idea Wotan conceives, perhaps only subliminally, during the sounding here of the Sword Motif #57, is that he will disguise himself as a mortal and wed a mortal woman who will give birth to a race of heroes. They will be brought up to challenge the gods’ rule by breaking their laws, and Wotan will later express his hope that eventually, of their own free volition, they will do what Wotan’s contract with the Giants forbids him to do (and all others who have faith in the gods), deprive Fafner of his payment for building Valhalla, specifically Alberich’s Ring, and guard it so that Alberich can never regain it and employ its power to annihilate the gods. We will learn from Wotan during his confession to Bruennhilde in V.2.2 that though the martyred heroes whom the Valkyries assemble, restored to life, in Valhalla, can successfully protect Valhalla from Alberich’s host of night, should Alberich ever regain his Ring the gods would be lost. In our allegory, this means that if objective, scientific thinking ever takes precedence over mytho-poetic thought as the source of human value and truth, faith in the gods will be finished. Wotan believes that this special race of Waelsung heroes alone can redeem the gods from this more alarming prospect.
Wotan’s first Waelsung hero, his son Siegmund, will unwittingly seek to restore man’s lost innocence by performing moral deeds of compassion, based purely, so it seems, upon Siegmund’s personal conscience. presumably (though not actually) freed from any influence of the gods and their laws. But Wotan will intervene in Siegmund’s development as a hero by inspiring Siegmund to perform these revolutionary acts, through the example Wotan, disguised, sets while raising Siegmund deliberately outside of society ruled by divine law. When Wotan, acknowledging this, concludes that his hopes for Siegmund have failed because he discerns behind even Siegmund’s
