Fafner: (#87 hint?:; #126:) What I lie on I own: (yawning) leave me to sleep (:87 hint?; :#126)! (#126 inverted; #48?)
Wanderer: (laughing loudly and turning back to Alberich) well, Alberich, that miscarried! (#17 vari) But call me a knave no longer!
Alberich has joined Wotan to add that though a hero is coming to assault what he describes as the “invulnerable” beast Fafner, since Siegfried only wants the Ring, if Fafner will give it to Alberich he’ll avert the fight so Fafner can enjoy the Hoard and live a long life of peace. But Fafner retorts that what he lies on, he owns, and asks them to let him sleep. Wotan, laughing, observes that their gambit misfired. The importance of this brief conversation to our allegory is that Wotan has just demonstrated that as long as religious faith and cherished tradition, characterized by the fear of anything new, any knowledge, which might overthrow faith and tradition, controls man’s conscious mind, Alberich will never be able to pry the Ring from Fafner. In other words, though religious faith has been weakening (which is why Fafner is now under threat at all), the values engendered by or supported by religious belief live on still, and man won’t easily give them up, even for the practical benefits of science and technology, the earthly power which Alberich can obtain with the Ring. Alberich calls Fafner an “invulnerable” beast because Wagner himself (in a passage previously cited) described egoism as “invulnerable”:
[P. 14] “The individual’s egoism is … assumed, and rightly, to be so invincible that arrangements beneficiary merely to the species, to coming generations, and hence the preservation of the species at cost of the transient individual, would never be consummated by that individual with labour and self-sacrifice, were it not guided by the fancy (Wahn) that it is thereby serving an end of its own; nay, this fancied end of its own must seem weightier to the individual, the satisfaction reapable from its attainment more potent and complete, than the purely-individual aim of everyday, of satisfying hunger and so forth, since, as we see, the latter is sacrificed with greatest keenness to the former. The author and incitor of this Wahn our philosopher [Schopenhauer] deems to be the spirit of the race itself, the almighty Will-of-life (Lebensville), supplanting the individual’s limited perceptive-faculty, seeing that without its intervention the [P. 15] the individual in narrow egoistic care for self, would gladly sacrifice the species on the altar of its personal continuance.” [698W-{64-2/65} On State and Religion: PW Vol. IV, p. 14-15]
Fafner’s remark that what he lies on, he owns, deserves special consideration. It is usually taken to be an expression of the nature of the capitalist, whose sole motive for striving to possess more and more property and money and the power they bring, transforming these goods and treasures into luxuries which by definition are beyond his capacity to personally use or enjoy, is a selfishness that deprives others of their most basic needs:
“[Speaking of “the law of Property,” Wagner said that:] in it the love which expresses itself in Man as the bent to satisfaction through the enjoyment of Nature and her products, became hardened into the unit’s exclusive right over Nature beyond his capacity for enjoyment … .” [390W-{1-2/49} Jesus of Nazareth: PW Vol. VIII. p. 302]
