(Siegfried has fanned the forge fire until it glows brighter than ever: #35/#33/#100 vari over #103 frags [sounding like a laugh]; #34)
Mime: I’ve grown as old as cave and wood but never saw the like! (#103/#103 frags)
Mime, of course, wonders how Siegfried, who never attentively followed Mime’s instructions in forging, could possibly re-forge the sword now on his own, but Siegfried has retorted that since Mime’s skill has always failed, Siegfried would have been wasting his time following his directions. When Mime complains that Siegfried has filed the sword’s fragments into mere splinters, Siegfried insists that only by reducing this sword to its smallest constituent parts can he re-forge the whole in his own image, so to speak. Siegfried the artist-hero, in other words, needs to be able to freely re-compose the elements of his religio-artistic heritage – i.e., man’s historical quest to restore lost innocence in various religions and artforms - in order to create something from it entirely new, coherent and whole. Accordingly, Mime notes that in this case only folly can help the fool to do something where no sage can help. That is to say, Siegfried is accomplishing something – seemingly by spontaneous instinct – which transcends what an uninspired craftsman would require conscious intellectual labor to achieve, but of course Siegfried’s efforts will outstrip anything an uninspired artist could ever hope to accomplish. Mime, astonished at Siegfried’s creative vitality, says to himself that he’s grown old as cave and wood but has never seen the like. We’re reminded that Fricka’s primary complaint to Wotan about the illicit activities of the Waelsung twins, Siegfried’s parents, was that what they were doing was new and unprecedented. Mime, representative of the egoism underlying established society and religious faith, can only mime, i.e, repeat the past: Siegfried alone brings forth the new. In the meantime, Siegfried fans the flames of the fire in which he will re-forge Nothung, accompanied by several of the Loge motifs associated with Loge’s protective ring of fire which surrounds the sleeping Bruennhilde. And Nothung, which Siegfried will re-forge, is the embodiment of the creative principle in nature, natural necessity, and as such Siegfried will wield his sword as a phallus, which will not only penetrate Loge’s protective veil of illusion to reach the dangerous truth hidden within it, but will penetrate the womb of Wotan’s wishes, his unconscious mind Bruennhilde, to inseminate her with the seed, the poetic idea, which will bring the redemptive Wagnerian music-drama to birth.
Feuerbach captures this distinction between the uninspired laborer Mime, and the inspired genius Siegfried, neatly in his following formulation which surely influenced Wagner’s characterisation of both Mime and Siegfried:
“Who can elevate mediation to a necessity and to a law of truth? Only he who … still struggles and quarrels with himself, and who still has not completely made up his mind; in short, only he in whom truth is only talent, … but not genius and a matter of the whole man. Genius is immediate, sensuous knowledge. What talent [Mime] has only in the head genius [Siegfried] has in the flesh and blood; namely that which for talent is still an object of thought is for genius an object of the senses.” [184F-PPF: p. 56]
