threaten both life and limb – (#52>>:) though it were not worth a whit (:#52) – the ring you’ll never wrest from me! (#45) For life and limb – (#19 vari: [this seems to be Bruennhilde’s “Triumphant” vari of #17 or #19/#20a from T.1.3., as heard when she told Waltraute that siegfried’s love, as embodied in the ring, means more to her than Valhalla and the gods eternal bliss?]) lo: thus (He picks up a clod of earth from the ground, holds it above his head and with the final words throws it behind him.) do I fling it far away from me! (#175)
Just as Bruennhilde, enjoying her banishment from the life of the gods and their concerns, proclaimed her immunity to Waltraute’s (i.e., Wotan’s) appeal to restore the Ring to the Rhinedaughters in order to redeem gods and world from the Ring curse, because the love she shares with Siegfried is her all in all, so Siegfried refuses the Rhinedaughters’ direct request that he grant them the Ring in order to end its curse and save himself, because he, the fearless hero, can never be prompted by fear (self-interest) to do anything. Neither Siegfried nor Bruennhilde are aware that Wotan’s ulterior intent, comprised of his fear of the real and futile hope to redeem himself from it through the illusory ideal, lives on in their love, and therefore they are also unaware that the gods’ destiny and the destiny of their love are one and the same. For this reason, only with the mutual betrayal by Siegfried and Bruennhilde of their love (their secular art exposed as nothing more than covert religion, Valhalla in a new form) will Valhalla and its illusions finally burn up.
The Rhinedaughters now resort to a metaphysical argument to impress Siegfried with the need to redeem himself from the Ring curse before it is too late. They tell him the Norns have woven it into their rope of primal law, as we hear both #45 (Alberich’s “Power of the Ring Motif”), the very incarnation of Alberich’s egoistic impulse toward self-aggrandizement, and #21 (Wotan’s Spear of lawful authority), the motival embodiment of the social contract, which is predicated on the prudence of egoism and self-interest. In other words, man’s very identity, his primary underlying motive, is the natural necessity of egoism and self-preservation, the basis for society itself, and also for man’s historical quest for power over his environment and fellow men. But Siegfried proudly retorts that since his sword once split a spear (Wotan’s spear), Nothung will also cut their rope of fate (natural law, which includes the subjection of all the living to egoism). This is precisely what already happened figuratively in T.P.1, situated between the two halves of Siegfried’s and Bruennhilde’s love duet (S.3.3 and T.P.2), when the Norns’ rope was split by the sound of Motif #57 (the Sword Motif – Wotan’s grand plan for redemption) and Siegfried’s Youthful Horncall, #103. The severing of the Norns’ rope of fate was figurative because the subjective effect of Siegfried’s unconscious artistic inspiration (of which the love duet was metaphor) was the felt impression (not the fact) that we have transcended the limits of time, space, and causality, and conquered our egoism, seeming to lose ourselves in the all.
Siegfried adds that a dragon (the Serpent Fafner) once warned him of this curse, but didn’t teach him fear (as we hear #37, the “Loveless Motif”). How curious that Wotan told Erda in S.3.1 that Siegfried was immune from Alberich’s curse on the Ring because Siegfried hadn’t learned fear, since moments later Bruennhilde taught him the meaning of fear! But of course, she taught Siegfried the meaning of fear subliminally, and therefore safely, so that through loving union with her he could forget his fear. Siegfried now contemplates the Ring as we hear both #59a (the
