all at once I understood what the little birds were singing (:#Remembrance Motif? (#@: e or f?)? [#139 or #174b or #174c inversion?]; :#106 hint?). (#11 vari:; #voc?:) On the boughs one sat and sang (:#11 vari; :#voc?): (#129:) ‘Hey! Siegfried now owns the Nibelung hoard: o might he now find the hoard in the cave! If he wanted to win the tarnhelm, it would serve him for wondrous deeds! But could he acquire the ring, it would make him lord of the world (:#129)!’ (#66?)
Hagen: Ring and tarnhelm you bore away?
A Vassal: did you hear the Woodbird again?
Siegfried (#66:) Ring and tarnhelm I’d gathered up (:#66) … .
In the first part of his narrative Siegfried has related how he did what Mime could not do, re-forge his father’s sword, and how he killed Fafner with it. So far, all is straightforward. But now, Siegfried relates events he describes as “wondrous,” as we hear, for the first time in awhile, #66, the motif recalling Sieglinde’s sympathy for Siegmund’s “Noth,” and the “Noth” of the Waelsung heroes in general, the “Noth” they inherited as unwitting agents of Wotan’s futile quest to redeem man’s religious impulse from Alberich’s curse on the Ring, the curse of consciousness. #66 on the long view represents the martyrdom the Waelsung heroes must suffer as agents of Wotan’s futile quest for redemption from the truth. Siegfried recalls how - the dead Fafner’s blood having burned them - he licked his fingers in order to cool them and could suddenly grasp the meaning of the Woodbird’s Songs. Siegfried now recalls in detail what he had once forgotten as he emerged with Alberich’s Ring and Tarnhelm from the dead Fafner’s Envy-Cave, what the Woodbird once told him, that Siegfried, now owning the Nibelung Hoard, should enter Fafner’s cave and retrieve the Tarnhelm, which will serve Siegfried for wondrous deeds, and the Ring, which would make Siegfried lord of the world. Accompanied by #66 again, Siegfried confirms that he followed the Woodbird’s advice and retrieved these two items from the cave. The fact that Siegfried now remembers expressly what the Woodbird once told him, and what he’d forgotten, shows that Siegfried of his own nature is now bringing his hoard of formerly unconscious knowledge from the silent depths (Bruennhilde’s safekeeping) to the light of day, even before Hagen has him drink the antidote to the potion of forgetfulness and love which Gutrune offered Siegfried in T.1.2. This of course suggests that Hagen’s potion is itself a reflection of a transformation taking place naturally in Siegfried’s own psyche. We need only recall Tristan’s admission that he himself brewed the love (and death) potion which Brangaene selected, a potion Tristan ultimately curses.
[T.3.2: D]
Siegfried now recalls the second of the Woodbird’s three revelations, namely, that Siegfried should not trust Mime, who has been exploiting Siegfried to win for Mime the Nibelung Hoard, and is now
