fondly, not leaving each other but building a nest and brooding inside it: (#104-based birdcall foreshadowing #128 frag?) young fledglings then would flutter out and both of them tended their brood. (#? – birdcalls) – (#106, #25) Deer, too, would rest in pairs in the bushes with even wild foxes and wolves: (#106 varis >>>:) the father brought food to the lair, the mother suckled the whelps. There I learned the meaning of love: ([[ #108 vari >>: ]] [not #37?]) from their mother I never took the whelps (:#108 vari >>). (#106:; #25 [emphatic!]) (#108>>:) Where, Mime, is your loving wife, that I may call her (#25 or #40?:) mother (:#108; :#25 or #40?)?
Mime: (angrily) What’s wrong with you, fool? How stupid you are! You’re neither a bird nor a fox.
Siegfried: (#105:) From a suckling babe you brought me up, warming the little mite with clothes (:#105): - but how did you come by the childish mite? You made me, no doubt, without a mother … .
Mime: (in great embarrassment) You have to believe what I tell you. I’m your father and mother in one.
Siegfried: (#104:) You’re lying, you loathsome fool (:#104)! (#?: [alternating chords]; #?: [Nature mood music of a different kind, possibly inspired by #92?]) That the young look like their parents I’ve luckily seen for myself. When I came to the limpid brook, I glimpsed trees and beasts in its glassy surface; sun and clouds, just as they are, appeared in the glittering stream. (#92:) And then I saw my own likeness too (:#92), (#71) quite different from you I thought myself then: (#41/#5 vari:) as like to a toad were a glittering fish, though no fish ever crept from a toad (#3?: [Rhine motion music?]).
Mime: (deeply annoyed) What frightful nonsense (:#3? [Rhine motion music?]) you’re spouting there! (#106 over #128 vari)
Siegfried, unlike Mime, is not interested so much in what the child owes to the parent, and the child’s love for the parent, but rather in the loving care which the parent provides for the child. This is a direct – yet unwitting - slap at Wotan, who, under Fricka’s influence, put egoistic concern for his power, and the rule of the gods, ahead of his love for his children Siegmund and Sieglinde. #108 is introduced as Siegfried describes how such fathers and mothers stick with each other in
