owed her father to battle, serving him
as Valkyrie. These warlike maidens hovered over the battle-field,
directing the fortune of the day according to Wotan's determination,
protecting this combatant and seeing his death-doom executed upon
the other; they seized the heroes as they fell, and bore them to
Walhalla to form part of Wotan's guard. From these "Slain in Battle"
it was that Walhalla had its name. To make great their number,
Wotan, who earlier had by laws and compacts tried to bind men to
peace, now breathed into them a rough, bellicose spirit, goaded
them on to quarrel and revolt.

That the end of the gods, if prophecy must fulfill itself, should not
be a contemptible or pitiful one, that was Wotan's preoccupation,--to
save, if nothing more, the dignity of the Eternals; with this in
view, to keep Alberich from recovering the Ring, by which he might
work such really disgusting havoc. The Ring was in the possession
of Fafner, who had turned himself into a dragon, and in a lonely
forest-girt cave guarded it and the rest of the treasure of the
Nibelungen, for the sake of which he had killed Fasolt, his brother.
Wotan, as we have seen, could not wrest from him the Ring which he
himself had given in payment for the building of Walhalla: for the
honour of his spear he must not attempt it. Alberich, not bound as
he was to keep his hands off it, must infallibly and indefatigably
be devising means to regain possession of it. It was plain to Wotan
that he must find some one to do that which he himself could not,
some one, who, unprompted by him, should yet accomplish his purposes,
some one free as he was not. This tool who was yet not to be his
tool, since a god's good faith demanded that neither directly nor
indirectly he should meddle with the Ring, Wotan supposed he had
created for himself in Siegmund, born to him, with a twin sister,
Sieglinde, of a human mother. This boy with whom, in human disguise,
under the names of Waelse and Wolf,--Wolf for his enemies, Waelse for
his kindred,--he lived in the wild woods, he reared in a spirit of
lawlessness, wild courage, disregard of the gods. We must suppose
it to have been for the sake of preventing association with women
from softening his disposition that, while Siegmund was a child,
Wotan, sacrificing to the hardness of fibre it was his object to
produce, permitted the catastrophe which deprived the boy of mother
and sister. Returning home from a day's wild chase,--hunte