The Valkyries

Before the curtain rises on the Valkyries, let us see what has
happened since it fell on The Rhine Gold. The persons of the
drama will tell us presently; but as we probably do not
understand German, that may not help us.

Wotan is still ruling the world in glory from his giant-built
castle with his wife Fricka. But he has no security for the
continuance of his reign, since Alberic may at any moment
contrive to recover the ring, the full power of which he can
wield because he has forsworn love. Such forswearing is not
possible to Wotan: love, though not his highest need, is a higher
than gold: otherwise he would be no god. Besides, as we have
seen, his power has been established in the world by and as a
system of laws enforced by penalties. These he must consent to be
bound by himself; for a god who broke his own laws would betray
the fact that legality and conformity are not the highest rule
of conduct--a discovery fatal to his supremacy as Pontiff and
Lawgiver. Hence he may not wrest the ring unlawfully from
Fafnir, even if he could bring himself to forswear love.

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