Mime sprang to his feet in despair, filled with terror and rage; for that was the one question he could not answer—that was his riddle, his everlasting mystery. Quietly Wotan rose from the hearth where he had been sitting. “I gave you three chances to ask me the question which I have now asked you. Foolishly, you let them all slip by. Listen while I answer it! _Only he who has never felt fear can forge Nothung anew._” He strode to the door of the cave, and there paused, looking back. “Guard well your head, O Dwarf! I leave it to him who knows not fear.” Smiling quietly, the Wanderer disappeared in the wood’s depths, and thunder and lightning followed him as he went. Mime was left—puzzled, despairing, terror-stricken. His vivid imagination began to conjure up before him visions of Fafner, the Dragon, and he had fallen behind the anvil, so great was his fear, when Siegfried came hastily in, asking once more for the sword. Mime, creeping out from behind the anvil, could not at once collect his scattered wits, and merely muttered: “_Only he who has never felt fear can forge Nothung anew._ My wits are too wise for that job.” Finally, as Siegfried demanded why he had not worked at the sword, he said, slowly: “I was fearing for your sake.” “_Fearing!_” said Siegfried. “What do you mean by fearing?” Mime described the tremblings, shudderings, and quakings aroused by fear, and Siegfried remarked, as he finished: “All that must seem very queer. I rather think I should like to feel all that—but how shall I learn?” Mime, delighted, told him of Fafner, and said that the Dragon would teach him, or any one else, the art of fearing, and ended by promising to lead him to Hate Hole the next day. “Does the world lie that way?” asked the boy. “To Hate Hole it is close at hand,” responded the wicked little Nibelung, beginning to feel rapture glow in his heart. But, when Siegfried again demanded the sword, the smith fell once more into despair, wailing that he could not shape it, that only one who knew not fear could forge it anew. Straight to the hearth sprang the strong young Volsung with the splinters of Nothung. “My father’s blade will I forge!” he cried; and he began to move about merrily, brightening the fire and hunting for the file with which to work on the broken blade. Mime watched him with wondering eyes. So swiftly and well did he work that even the clever smith could not understand. And, as he dragged at the rope of the bellows and blew up the fire in the forge, this is the song that Siegfried sang: “Nothung, Nothung, notable sword! Who did thy bright steel shiver? To shreds I have shattered the noble blade, In the pot I shall melt each sliver. “Oho, oho, aha, aha, oho! Bellows blow, Brighten the glow! “Far in the woodlands wild and fair, ’Mid the thickets, a tree felled I; I have burned the brown ash into coal, On the hearth I have piled it high.