There follows a strange and beautiful scene. Siegmund lies down to rest; the fire glimmers fitfully, then blazes up, revealing at the point on the trunk at which Sieglinda had gazed a shining sword-hilt, the blade embedded in the trunk. Still Siegmund does not understand, and the fire dies down; he is beginning to slumber when Sieglinda enters and calls him. He starts up; she has put a sleeping-powder in Hunding's cup, and they are safe; and thus begins the greatest love-duet, next to the _Tristan_, in the world. Sieglinda tells how when she, full of grief, was wedded to Hunding, a grey old man, with one eye, clad in a blue cloak, came in uninvited, drove the sword Nothung into the ash-tree, and said that it should belong to the hero strong enough to draw it out. From all parts warriors came, but none could move it. Sieglinda feels that the appointed man has come; Siegmund grasps the weapon and triumphantly pulls it out. Then they reveal their names, and recognise one another as brother and sister, and the Act ends. This is the first step towards Wotan's discomfiture. The significance of the Sword theme in the _Rhinegold_ at the moment when he has the Master-idea will now be apparent. The sword was so endowed by Wotan that only a fearless hero could use it; therefore, when Siegmund draws it from the wood, Wotan, watching from Valhalla, knows he has succeeded in raising up the hero he needed. Siegmund had been tested by all manner of misfortune; no harder life could have been his; Wotan had never aided him, but thrown disasters in his path; and had he failed or succumbed Wotan's device would have failed. But freely, independently, with no help from the god, he had come through all, and now his own strength enabled him to take the sword to--to what?--to work Wotan's will! That is, in creating Siegmund, even in testing him, in preparing for him a weapon that none could stand against, Wotan, far from successfully accomplishing his purpose, was accomplishing his ruin. Disillusionment comes swiftly. The first deed of his hero is to break two of the most sacred laws of heaven--laws binding on Wotan until he gets the Ring--for he carries off another man's wife, who is, moreover, his own sister. The punishment for that is matter for the next Act. At the end of the first we have seen that Wotan's Master-idea is a delusion. He might as well go and kill Fafner himself and take the Ring as breed a hero to do it for him with the aid of a magic sword. If he did so it would be by virtue of the power conferred on him by the runes on the Spear; and by those runes--those laws--Siegmund must be, and is, promptly judged and punished. II