Wotan is repressing knowledge in Bruennhilde which has not yet attained consciousness, but which now threatens to wake in him and become conscious (as Alberich threatened that his hoard of knowledge would rise from silent depths to the light of day to overthrow the gods’ illusions), by restoring it to his unconscious, his safe repository, through his confession to Bruennhilde.
Perhaps #88, generally described as a motif representing doom, but which in our broader reading expresses the fated end of the gods and of all who are implicated in the gods’ futile effort to redeem themselves from Alberich’s curse, is heard as Wotan recounts how, having learned wisdom from Erda, the seed he planted in Erda gave birth to their daughter Bruennhilde, because Bruennhilde as a Valkyrie is not only the herald of doom to heroes about to be martyred in the cause of Wotan’s futile quest for redemption from the twilight of the gods, but also because Bruennhilde’s love offers temporary redemption from this ultimate doom her mother Erda prophesied. #88 will be introduced definitively in V.2.4 when Bruennhilde announces his fated doom to Siegmund, as she and her Valkyrie sisters have always done when selecting heroes on the battlefield and inspiring them to martyrdom for Valhalla’s sake. Significantly, according to Cooke it is a member of the heroic family of motifs which stem from the last three notes of #53, to which Erda proclaimed that all is ephemeral.
[V.2.2: F]
Wotan now informs us in some detail, for the first time, what role his daughters by Erda - Bruennhilde and her Valkyrie sisters - have played as muses of inspiration for the martyred heroes, upon whose legacy he has up until now been able to depend in order to keep Alberich’s anticipated assault on Valhalla and its values at bay. The Valkyrie muses have inspired Wotan’s chosen heroes with the same subliminal fear of truth which prompted Wotan to seek consolation from Erda, the Valkyries’ mother, in the first place:
Wotan: (#77) With eight sisters I brought you up: through you Valkyries I hoped to avert the fate that the Vala had made me fear – a shameful end of the gods everlasting. (#77:) That our foe might find us stalwart in strife I bade you bring me heroes (:#77): (#21 hint?:) those men whom, high-handed, we tamed by our laws, those men whose mettle we held in check by binding them to us in blind allegiance through troubled treaties’ treacherous bonds (:#21 hint?). (#77:) You’d [didn’t Spencer mean to say something like “you were …”?] to spur them on (increasingly animated, but with muted force) to onslaught and strife, honing their strength for hot-blooded battle (:#77), so that hosts of valiant warriors I’d gather in Valhalla’s hall. (#20a?)
The nine Valkyries, Bruennhilde and her sisters, all daughters of Wotan and Erda, are muses of inspiration through whom the culture-heroes - chosen by their own genius to help save Valhalla from Alberich’s threat to overthrow the gods (religious belief) - will be inspired to martyrdom and enter Valhalla as a realm of memory and tradition, culture-heroes who invent and sustain a
