greeting may evermore greet you, if you may nevermore ride beside me nor serve me mead at table; if I must lose you whom I loved, you laughing delight of my eye: (#97/#34:) a bridal fire shall burn for you such as never blazed for a bride (:#97/#34)! (#35) Fiery flames shall encircle the fell; (#97:) with withering fears let them fright the faint-hearted (:#97); (#77:) the coward shall flee from Bruennhilde’s fell (:#77): - (#92:) for one man alone shall woo the bride, one freer than I, the god (:#92)!
In disavowing any further concern with his beloved Waelsung race, his only hope of redemption from Alberich’s curse, Wotan has unwittingly foretold exactly what will become of Siegfried, for he tells Bruennhilde that spite, i.e. “Neid,” was bound to destroy the Waelsungs, and that is exactly what will happen. Through Hagen’s machinations (Hagen being the very embodiment of Alberich’s resentment of the gods, who co-opted his rightful power) Siegfried will dishonorably serve the craven needs of the Gibichungs Gunther, Gutrune, and primarily Hagen, in Twilight of the Gods. But Wotan must disavow any concern with Bruennhilde’s future in order to insure that his own egoistic motives don’t corrupt the hope for redemption she represents.
Wotan’s intent to punish Bruennhilde for disobedience by putting her to sleep to wake for, and be forcefully wed to, any man who happens upon her, seems at first the shamefullest of fates, Wotan’s wholesale renunciation of love, until one realizes that this is in fact the fulfillment of Wotan’s confession to Bruennhilde. The only means for Wotan to find a free, fearless hero who will do, of himself, involuntarily yet spontaneously, what Wotan desires him to do, without becoming aware that it is Wotan’s fear of the end which motivates him, is for Bruennhilde to receive Wotan’s confession and impart it, through unconscious inspiration, to Wotan’s heir, the artist-hero Siegfried. In those works of art which Bruennhilde, his muse, inspires Siegfried to create, Valhalla, the supernatural realm of the gods, can live on again, figuratively reborn, and freed from vulnerability to Alberich’s curse of consciousness.
This may well explain what otherwise seems inexplicable, the fact that #20c, the third segment of the Valhalla Motif #20, is heard here as Wotan tells Bruennhilde that he who wakes Bruennhilde will take her, awakened, as wife. In other words, Siegfried, upon waking Bruennhilde, will fall heir to the legacy of Valhalla, including Wotan’s hoard of forbidden knowledge which he confessed to Bruennhilde, his unspoken secret. It is worth recalling that #20a, the first segment of the Valhalla Motif, is derived from Alberich’s Ring Motif #19, and that the second segment of the Valhalla Motif, #20b, may well be a basis for one of Wotan’s two Wanderer Motifs, #113, which reminds us that Wotan told Fricka that though he might well enjoy the domestic tranquility of Valhalla, she must allow him, as a god, to win the outside world for himself. That is to say, through historical man’s collective experience of the world, man acquires a hoard of knowledge of the world. It is this hoard of objective knowledge which will ultimately overthrow man’s belief in the gods. Siegfried, by winning Bruennhilde, Wotan’s collective unconscious, falls heir to Wotan’s debt to Alberich, and to Wotan’s hoard of knowledge, so dangerous to the gods, which Wotan repressed into Bruennhilde during his confession. Siegfried, like his muse Bruennhilde, thus falls heir to the artist’s responsibility to neutralize the threat represented by this fateful knowledge. He will redeem
