The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring — John Shaqi
The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's RingShaw, Bernard
Philosophy
The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring
Shaw, Bernard
Opera; Wagner, Richard, 1813-1883. Ring des Nibelungen
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, 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."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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