“When the woodbird warns Siegfried afresh against Mime’s approach, and as the latter now creeps up from afar, wondering who could have told the lad of the ring, we hear gently, oh so gently his mother Sieglinde’s loving concern for her son sound forth with tuneful tenderness – the son to whom, dying, she had given birth. The bird continues to hold our attention with its gentle warning phrases, as Mime now turns fawningly to Siegfried.” [745W-{2/24/69}Letter to King Ludwig II of Bavaria: SLRW, p. 740]
This presents a problem. While it follows logically from Sieglinde’s concern for her son’s welfare that her spirit, taking the form of the Woodbird, would tip him off to Mime’s treacherous nature (we must assume she intuited this during her all too brief sojourn, just prior to death, with Mime), and we can rationalize the Woodbird’s final request that Siegfried seek the sleeping Bruennhilde for his bride as a logical follow-up to Sieglinde’s expression of hope to Bruennhilde that her woe (the yet unborn Siegfried in her womb) would smile upon Bruennhilde someday, it is not so easy, on this hypothesis, to make sense of the Woodbird’s notifying Siegfried that in killing Fafner he’s inherited the Hoard, Tarnhelm, and Ring. At no point in the Ring is there even a hint that the Waelsung twins Sieglinde or Siegmund know anything at all about Alberich’s property or the curse it’s under. In fact, Wotan’s whole intent in bringing the Waelsungs into the world was that they should know nothing of his craven fears or desires, but should do what Wotan wants of their own free volition, uninfluenced by his concerns. The only characters in this work who express a longing for Siegfried to take possession of these Nibelung treasures are Wotan and Mime, and of course Mime represents the prosaic nature of Wotan’s underlying motives. If, therefore, we read the presence of #66 here not merely as a reminder of Siegfried’s mother Sieglinde, but understand it more broadly as representing the “Noth” which the Waelsung race must suffer as heirs to Alberich’s curse, thanks to Wotan’s need for a hero who will take on the burden of Alberich’s curse to redeem the gods from it, it makes perfect sense that all three of the Woodbird’s messages to Siegfried reflect Wotan’s long-term plan for Siegfried.
It is not until much later in the drama that Wotan comes to the conclusion that he must ultimately return the Ring to the Rhinedaughters so they can dissolve it and its curse in the healing waters of the Rhine. Right up until the end of Siegfried, Wotan believes that Siegfried and Bruennhilde’s love alone will redeem the world from Alberich’s curse on the Ring. This is proved by the fact that though Wotan ecstatically informs Erda in S.3.1 that Siegfried is free from Alberich’s curse on the Ring (because Siegfried hasn’t learned the meaning of fear), and that Bruennhilde, upon waking, will perform that act which will redeem the world, it is not until Wotan sees that Siegfried has come under Hagen’s influence and is betraying his love for Bruennhilde (that redemption by love which Wotan sought), that he decides it is best, after all, that Bruennhilde return the Ring to the Rhinedaughters, an afterthought which Bruennhilde’s sister Waltraute imparts to her in T.1.3.1.
Wotan’s long-term plan is that Siegfried must eliminate faith’s stranglehold on freedom of thought (i.e., kill Fafner), in order to emancipate man’s artistic cunning from its service to the gods, take aesthetic possession of the Hoard of knowledge, Tarnhelm of imagination, and Ring representing the human mind’s power, so that Alberich cannot regain his lost power, eliminate Wotan’s head (Mime) in order to insure the purity of his heart (Siegfried), and leave the Ring in Bruennhilde’s safekeeping, transforming Wotan’s thought into feeling, so that Wotan and the gods can be redeemed from Alberich’s objective consciousness, in the sense that religious faith lives on no
