Wotan needs, final rest from his futile quest for redemption, atonement for his sin against all that was, is, and will be, which will also effectively bring about the end of Alberich’s curse on his Ring:
Bruennhilde: (#87: [& “Crisis” on drums]) Do I now know what you need (:#87 [& “Crisis”])? – (#87:; #5?:) All things! All things! All things (:#87; :#5?) I know, (#37, #40, or #68:?; #126 rhythm on drums?:) all is clear to me now (:#37, #40, or #68; :#126 rhythm on drums?)! (#161 chords: [#15 vari?] [the #Raven Motif?]) I hear the rustle of your raven’s wings (:#161 chords [#15 vari?] [the #Raven Motif?]): with anxiously longed for tidings [“mit bang ersehnter Botschaft”] I send the (51:) two of them home (:#51). (#51?; #68 or #159? [perhaps with a touch of #Alberich’s complaint to Wotan in R.4 about Wotan’s hypocrisy in taking the ring from Alberich? Is there an element of #19 vari as heard in Alberich’s “no happy man shall ever have joy of it”?]) (#59 chords:) Rest now (:#59 chords), (#20c:; #83:) rest now (:#20c; :#83), (#20d:) you god (:#20d)! (#20d?)
Bruennhilde, now woken forever, is indistinguishable from Mother Erda (Mother Nature) as she was known objectively to Alberich and Wotan when they were in possession of Alberich’s Ring. We see evidence for this reading in Wagner’s following identification of the wisdom Bruennhilde speaks in the finale of the Ring, not only with Wotan’s hoard of runes (which Wotan confessed to Breunnhilde, and which she in turn imparted to Siegfried), but with the Ring’s runes, the ur-law and the Norns’ runes (i.e., Erda’s knowledge, which the Norns spin into their rope of fate):
[P. 310] “Bruennhild: ‘Thou forward hero [Siegfried], how thou held’st me banned! All my rune-lore I bewrayed to thee, a mortal, and so went widowed of my wisdom; thou usedst it not, though trustedst in thyself alone: but now that thou must yield it up through death, my knowledge comes to me again, and this Ring’s runes I rede. The ur-law’s runes, too, know I now, the Norns’ old saying! Hear then, ye mighty Gods, your guilt is quit: thank him, the hero, who took your guilt upon him!‘ “ [380W-{6-8/48} The Nibelungen Myth: PW Vol. VII, p. 310] [See also 385W]
But Bruennhilde’s knowledge now embraces also Wotan’s sin against all that was, is, and will be, all the tricks of self-deception that religious man had employed throughout the millennia to deny and repress Mother Nature’s truth, a formerly unconscious process whose secret has now been exposed, in Bruenhilde herself. We hear the Fate Motif #87 as Bruennhilde describes herself as, effectively, her mother Erda, and we recall hearing it also in S.3.3 when Bruennhilde told Siegfried that what he does not know, she knows for him. Wotan had told Erda that her wisdom waned before his Will, i.e., before his unconscious mind Bruennhilde, and had consigned Erda to sleep forever, so that Erda, dreaming, could behold the twilight of the gods, but now Erda’s cosmic knowledge wakes, becomes consciously objective, in her daughter Bruennhilde, never to be put back to sleep again. Bruennhilde claims that her newly acquired consciousness of all things has granted her knowledge of Wotan’s true need, and his true need is to succumb to Alberich’s curse in a twilight of the gods, so that Alberich’s curse on all those who would co-opt the power of his Ring (i.e., of the human mind) to perpetuate religious self-deception, will be lifted.
