old. The persons of the drama will tell us
presently; but as we probably do not understand German, that may not
help us.

Wotan is still ruling the world in glory from his giant-built castle
with his wife Fricka. But he has no security for the continuance of his
reign, since Alberic may at any moment contrive to recover the ring,
the full power of which he can wield because he has forsworn love. Such
forswearing is not possible to Wotan: love, though not his highest need,
is a higher than gold: otherwise he would be no god. Besides, as we have
seen, his power has been established in the world by and as a system
of laws enforced by penalties. These he must consent to be bound by
himself; for a god who broke his own laws would betray the fact that
legality and conformity are not the highest rule of conduct--a discovery
fatal to his supremacy as Pontiff and Lawgiver. Hence he may not wrest
the ring unlawfully from Fafnir, even if he could bring himself to
forswear love.

In this insecurity he has hit on the idea of forming a heroic bodyguard.
He has trained his love children as war-maidens (Valkyries) whose duty
it is to sweep through battle-fields and bear away to Valhalla the souls
of the bravest who fall there. Thus reinforced by a host of warriors,
he has thoroughly indoctrinated them, Loki helping him as
dialectician-in-chief, with the conventional system of law and duty,
supernatural religion and self-sacrificing idealism, which they believe
to be the essence of his godhood, but which is really only the machinery
of the love of necessary power which is his mortal weakness. This
process secures their fanatical devotion to his system of government,
but he knows perfectly well that such systems, in spite of their moral
pretensions, serve selfish and ambitious tyrants better than benevolent
despots, and that, if once Alberic gets the ring back, he will easily
out-Valhalla Valhalla, if not buy it over as a going concern. The only
chance of permanent security, then, is the appearance in the world of a
hero who, without any illicit prompting from Wotan, will destroy Alberic
and wrest the ring from Fafnir. There will then, he believes, be no
further cause for anxiety, since he does not yet conceive Heroism as
a force hostile to Godhead. In his longing for a rescuer, it does not
occur to him that when the Hero comes, his first exploit must be to
sweep the gods and their ordinances from the path of the heroic will.

Indeed,