You smile and say that they were not possible, even then! Remember that this is a fairy tale—a day-dream—such as might come to you while watching the sunlit ripples dancing on the water, and hearing the little waves lapping on the pebbles—a fairy tale, that is all. The Golden Age, as I think of it, seems a period in which anything might have happened. Closing my eyes, I can picture the majestic gods moving, great kings and queens among human beings; great kings and queens made young by Friea’s apples of youth. Friea was the Goddess of Love, Youth, and Beauty. She was the same as Venus, the Roman goddess, called Aphrodite by the Greeks, of whom, perhaps, you have read elsewhere. All that I am writing about happened, you know, in Germany; and to the people there the gods—or rather men’s ideas of them, and their names for them—were different from those of other lands. So the King God, instead of being Jupiter, or Zeus, or Jove, was called Wotan, or sometimes Odin. And the Queen Goddess was neither Juno nor Hera, but Fricka; and the wild Thunder God was Thor; and the Goddess of the Earth Erda, which means the earth. She was the wisest of all the gods and goddesses (though Logi, the Fire God, was the quickest and cleverest), and she could prophesy strange things about the gods and the world, and everything happened just as she prophesied. She would sink into the earth and dream, and all her dreams came true. She would tell them to her daughters, the three Norns, or Fates, and they would weave them into a long golden thread, into which they had spun the world’s history. They spun under a great ash-tree which grew by the Fountain of Wisdom, and was called the Tree of the World. One day Wotan, the king of the gods, came to the fountain for a draught of the Water of Wisdom. He drank, and left one of his eyes in payment. He tore a limb from the World-Ash and made it into a spear; and the spear, having strange figures upon it representing Law and Knowledge, was typical of the wisdom and power of the gods, and so long as that wisdom and that power endured no sword could break the spear nor could remain whole at its touch. But the World-Ash, robbed of its branches, withered away and died, and the Fountain of Wisdom became dry. And these things were the beginning of the end of the Golden Age. But wise people say that the Golden Age did not end until men began to value gold for its own sake and the love of gain, and to do wrong things to possess it. And now I will tell you how it all happened. [Music: Motif of the Primal Element, out of which come the Erda, Norn, and Rhine Motifs] [Music: Song of the Rhine Maidens Weia waga, wavering waters, weaving and whirling! Walala weia!] CHAPTER I THE RHINE MAIDENS