he feels that in his own Godhead is the germ of such Heroism,
and that from himself the Hero must spring. He takes to wandering,
mostly in search of love, from Fricka and Valhalla. He seeks the First
Mother; and through her womb, eternally fertile, the inner true thought
that made him first a god is reborn as his daughter, uncorrupted by his
ambition, unfettered by his machinery of power and his alliances with
Fricka and Loki. This daughter, the Valkyrie Brynhild, is his true will,
his real self, (as he thinks): to her he may say what he must not say to
anyone, since in speaking to her he but speaks to himself. "Was Keinem
in Worten unausgesprochen," he says to her, "bleib es ewig: mit mir nur
rath' ich, red' ich zu dir."

But from Brynhild no hero can spring until there is a man of Wotan's
race to breed with her. Wotan wanders further; and a mortal woman bears
him twins: a son and a daughter. He separates them by letting the girl
fall into the hands of a forest tribe which in due time gives her as a
wife to a fierce chief, one Hunding. With the son he himself leads the
life of a wolf, and teaches him the only power a god can teach, the
power of doing without happiness. When he has given him this terrible
training, he abandons him, and goes to the bridal feast of his daughter
Sieglinda and Hunding. In the blue cloak of the wanderer, wearing the
broad hat that flaps over the socket of his forfeited eye, he appears in
Hunding's house, the middle pillar of which is a mighty tree. Into that
tree, without a word, he strikes a sword up to the hilt, so that only
the might of a hero can withdraw it. Then he goes out as silently as he
came, blind to the truth that no weapon from the armory of Godhead can
serve the turn of the true Human Hero. Neither Hunding nor any of his
guests can move the sword; and there it stays awaiting the destined
hand. That is the history of the generations between The Rhine Gold and
The Valkyries.

The First Act

This time, as we sit looking expectantly at the curtain, we hear, not
the deep booming of the Rhine, but the patter of a forest downpour,
accompanied by the mutter of a storm which soon gathers into a roar
and culminates in crashing thunderbolts. As it passes off, the curtain
rises; and there is no mistaking whose forest habitation we are in; for
the central pillar is a mighty tree, and the place fit for the dwelling
of a fierce chief. The door opens: and an exhausted man reels in: an
ade