Wagner and Volospa

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Wagner and the "Völospá" Author(s): Stanley R. Hauer Reviewed work(s): Source: 19th-Century Music, Vol. 15, No. 1 (Summer, 1991), pp. 52-63 Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/746298 . Accessed: 08/11/2012 12:54 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to 19th- Century Music. http://www.jstor.org

Transcript of Wagner and Volospa

Page 1: Wagner and Volospa

Wagner and the "Völospá"Author(s): Stanley R. HauerReviewed work(s):Source: 19th-Century Music, Vol. 15, No. 1 (Summer, 1991), pp. 52-63Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/746298 .Accessed: 08/11/2012 12:54

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to 19th-Century Music.

http://www.jstor.org

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Wagner and the V61ospdt

STANLEY R. HAUER

The major narrative sources of Der Ring des Ni- belungen are well known and documented. Wagner himself remarked on them several times in his conversations, prose works, and correspondence. The fullest such statement was enclosed in a letter from Wagner to Franz Miuller on 9 January 1856; there he listed ten works, six medieval and four modern.' To these

might be added fairly easily another dozen ti- tles, for Wagner, though not a professional scholar, was amazingly well informed in virtu- ally every aspect of Nibelung literature.

Certainly to Wagner the most important work from this list was the thirteenth-century Vilsunga Saga, which he knew in the transla- tion of Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen (1815) and which he borrowed from the royal library in Dresden.2 V61sunga Saga provided Wagner with the overall plot-line of the Wdilsung dy- 19th-Century Music XV/1 (Summer 1991). ? by the Re-

gents of the University of California Press.

Some of the research for this essay was conducted under the auspices of a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar at New York University, 1990. I wish to thank Robert Bailey of New York University for his gen- erosity with both his time and his extensive library of Wagneriana; also thanks to Ulrich Mtiller of the Univer- sitdit Salzburg for providing me with copies of program booklets from Bayreuth. 'The "Zettelchen" of Wagner's source list was first pub- lished in Skizzen und Entwiirfe zur Ring-Dichtung, ed. Otto Strobel (Munich, 1930), p. 20, and has often been re- printed since. A facsimile of the slip appears in the pro- gram booklet of the 1988 Bayreuth Walkiire. The ten works listed there are Lachman, Der Nibelunge Not und Klage and Zu den Nibelungen; Jacob Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie; the Eddas (both poetic and prose); Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen, trans. of the Volsunga Saga and Wilkina- und Niflunga Saga (i.e., jidfreks Saga), and Das deutsche Heldenbuch; Wilhelm Grimm, Die deutsche

Heldensage; Mone, Untersuchungen zur deutschen Hel- densage; and Mohnike, trans. of Snorri Sturluson, Heims- kringla. In the same year (1956), Muiller privately printed the first study of the Ring and its sources, Ober die sagengeschichtlichen Grundlagen der Ringdichtung, later revised and published as Der Ring des Nibelungen: Eine Studie zur Einfiihrung in die gleichnamige Dichtung Ri- chard Wagners (Leipzig, 1862). Elizabeth Magee, Richard Wagner and the Nibelungs (Oxford, 1991), a promising study of Wagner's contemporary German sources, has just been published as this essay goes to print. 2See Wagner's letter to Theodor Uhlig, 12 November 1851, printed in Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, ed. and trans. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (New York, 1987), pp. 232-33; there he asks Uhlig to borrow the volume from the Dresden library and post it to him in Switzerland.

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nasty, a narrative which he redeveloped exten- sively, condensing here, expanding there, and generally shaping the diffuse form of the fornal- darsaga into a coherent, thematically signifi- cant drama.3 Moreover, the choice of Vdlsunga Saga is important in that it represents Wagner's deliberate break with the well-known German version of the Siegfried story as represented in the Nibelungenlied.

Instead of the familiar German account, Wagner chose the more remote Norse recen- sion which retains elements of a primitive or- igin, at least when compared with the courtly Nibelungenlied.4 In the Northern recension, for example, a prior relationship between Sieg- fried and Brtinnhilde is frankly acknowledged; whereas in southern Germany, Siegfried's adul- tery is prudishly suppressed, and his murder motivated by the comparatively feeble device of a quarrel between the wives of Siegfried and Gunther over first place in a court procession. Wagner's choice was for the more rigorous- even if the less familiar - of the two traditions. He wrote in his 1851 autobiographical essay Eine Mitteilung an meine Freunde:

In the ardour to discover what thing it was that drew me so resistlessly to the primal source of old home [i.e., German] Sagas, I drove step by step into the deeper reaches of antiquity. .... My studies thus bore me, through the legends of the Middle Ages, right down to their foundation in the old-Germanic Mythos.... Now for the first time, also, did I rec- ognize the possibility of making him [Siegfried] the hero of a drama; a possibility that had not occurred to me while I only knew him from the medieval Ni- belungenlied.-

Of course, Wagner was not the first to write a Nibelung drama. In the Epilogischer Bericht to the Ring poem published in 1871, Wagner ac- knowledges his acquaintance with the drama Der Nibelungen Hort (produced 1828) of Ernst Raupach.6 And in 1844 Friedrich Theodor Vi- scher had proposed the Nibelung legends as an ideal subject for a national opera.7 But the only pre-Wagnerian Nibelung drama or opera de- rived from Norse rather than German sources is

Fouqud's trilogy Der Held des Nordens (1808- 10), which Wagner never mentions, even though internal evidence indicates that he knew and even borrowed from it in the Ring." Indeed, of the fifty or more Nibelung dramas written in German from the Renaissance to the present day, most are derived from Nibelungen- lied and the southern German recension.9

Thus much of the distinctive character of the Ring poem can be explained by Wagner's use of Northern narrative sources, especially Vdlsunga Saga. But two other distinctions of the Ring are not accounted for by this explana- tion, namely (1) the richness of the textual fabric of the Ring poems - that is, their distinc- tive metrical form, abundance in detail, and lexical intricacy; and (2) the cosmology or world-myth with which Wagner surrounds the Siegfried story, like a diamond in an elaborate setting. These characteristics, I hope to demon- strate, are attributable to Wagner's knowledge and use of the Poetic Edda, that great collection of Viking verse whose literary quality he imi- tates so successfully in the Ring dramas. And more specifically, I shall argue that the overall structure of the Ring and its cosmological framework are derived from the opening poem of the eddic collection, the Vdlospd.

Wagner could have known the Poetic Edda through any of five German translations: in

3A fornaldarsaga (pl. -sogur) is a long Norse tale in prose concerning a mythological Germanic hero. Though the stories they tell may be early, the fornaldarsogur are among the last of the sagas to be written down (ca. 1250- 1350). Another fornaldarsaga that treats the story of Sieg- fried is Nornagests adttr. 4The scholarly literature on the development of the Sieg- fried and Nibelung stories is vast indeed; good introduc- tions are provided by Andreas Heusler, Nibelungensage und Nibelungenlied (5th edn. Dortmund, 1955); and The- odore M. Andersson, The Legend of Brynhild, vol. 43, Is- landica (Ithaca and London, 1980). 5Richard Wagner's Prose Works, ed. and trans. William Ashton Ellis, 8 vols. (London, 1892-99), I, 357-58.

6Ellis, Wagner's Prose, III, 261. 7Ernest Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner, vol. 2 (New York, 1937), pp. 25-27. 8Friedrich Panzer, "Richard Wagner und Fouqud," lahr- buch des freien deutschen Hochstifts (Frankfurt, 1907); Julian Hirsch, Fouques "Held des Nordens." Seine Quellen und seine Komposition (Berlin, 1910). 9See Holger Schulz, Der Nibelungenstoff auf dem deut- schen Theater (Cologne, 1972); Otfrid Ehrismann, Das Ni- belungenlied in Deutschland (Munich, 1975), pp. 247-59; and Werner Wunderlich, Der Schatz des Drachentodters (Stuttgart, 1977), pp. 21-30.

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chronological order, von der Hagen (1812), the Brothers Grimm (1815), Majer (1818), Ettmiiller (1837), or Simrock (1851). He possessed the first three of these in the library which he accumu- lated in Dresden, before his exile and flight to Switzerland in 1849.10 Wagner became person- ally acquainted with Ettmiiller (known jocu- larly to his friends as "Eddamiiller") in Zurich, and he mentions Simrock's translation in later prose works.11 He seems not to have used the translations of Legis or Studach, both from 1829. Lexical similarities suggest that the translation with which Wagner was most fa- miliar was Ettmiiller's, but since this contains only the Nibelung poems, Wagner must have turned to von der Hagen and Simrock-espe- cially, it seems, the latter-for the other texts.12 He saw much to admire in these eddic poems; he knew them well, would read and recite them aloud to friends, and continued (as Cosima Wagner's diaries make clear) to read them even into later life.13

I The Edda influenced the textual and poetic

qualities of the Ring in three primary ways: in verse form, in several direct borrowings or par- allelisms, and in Wagner's new attention to language.14 The famous - and controversial -

Stabreim of the Ring poem, which Wagner jus- tified so fully in the third part of Oper und Drama, is attributable directly to Ettmifller's translation.'" Though Ettmtiller was not the first modern German writer to employ a Norse style Stabreim (this distinction belongs to Fou- que), his translation was the first to do so from a set of principles (based on the work of Danish philologist Rasmus Rask), which he explains in a brief preface (pp. ix-xiv). Virtually everything Wagner understood (or at times misunderstood) about Old Norse metrics comes from Ett- miiller. Most notable is Wagner's ignorance of the primacy of the hbfudstafr, the head-stave which determines the alliteration of the entire long line.16 That Wagner was unaware of this fact casts no dispersion on his scholarship, but rather upon that of his master, Ettmiller. Nev- ertheless, Wagner's other major divergence from true eddic meter, his rejection of stanza form, is his own deliberate invention, so that he employs indiscriminately the two-stress half- lines of fornyr6islag and the three-stress lines of lij6ahdittr without regard to their distinctive use in Old Norse and in Ettmiiller.17 This is his own poetic license.

'OSee Curt von Westernhagen, Richard Wagners Dresdener Bibliothek, 1842-49 (Wiesbaden, 1966). "For example, the epilogue to the Ring poem cited above; Ellis, Wagner's Prose, III, 263. 12Ernst Moritz Ludwig Ettmiiller, Die Lieder der Edda von den Nibelungen (Zurich, 1837); von der Hagen, Lieder der ilteren oder Sdmundischen Edda (Berlin, 1812); Karl Sim- rock, Die Edda: Die dltere und iiingere (Stuttgart, 1851). The textual parallels with EttmiUller will be discussed below. This is the only translation from which Wagner borrowed directly. Simrock's translation became standard in the second half of the century and was certainly Wag- ner's preferred text in later life, though its 1851 publica- tion date prohibited its use in the early stages of the drafting of the Ring poems. 13Cosima Wagner's Diaries, ed. Martin Gregor-Dellin and Dietrich Mack, trans. with intro. Geoffrey Skelton, 2 vols. (New York, 1978-80); see, e.g., I, 73, 345, 419, 666, 667, 865. 14Quotations from the Ring are from the 1863 text and have been compared with the Dover scores for accuracy, since Wagner made numerous changes in his poems while setting them. Citations (by stanza numbers) from the Po- etic Edda are from Edda: Die Lieder des Codex Regius nebst verwandten Denkmdlern, ed. Gustav Neckel and Hans Kuhn (Heidelberg, 1962).

'5Hermann Wiessner, Der Stabreimvers in Richard Wag- ners "Ring des Nibelungen," Germanische Studien 30 (Berlin, 1924; rpt. 1967); also Peter Branscombe, "Die Sprachliche Form der Dramen," in Richard-Wagner Hand- buch, ed. Ulrich Miller and Peter Wapnewski (Stuttgart, 1986), pp. 186-89. "6The head-stave is the third stressed syllable in a full met- rical line, made up, in turn, of two half-lines, as in this ex- ample from the Volospd:

scegg6ld, scalm6ld, scildir ro klofnir Sometimes, if only by coincidence, head-staves do carry their proper function in Wagner's alliterative couplets of the Ring: "Der Minner Sippe / sagf hier im Saal" (though in Norse prosody the final stress-here Saal-would not al- literate except in special circumstances). More often, how- ever, the head-stave is ignored in Wagner: "Traurig sag3 ich / wdihrend sie tranken." 17Fornyrdislag, the primary eddic meter, consisted of stanzas (normally quatrains) of four-stress full lines, like that from the Vdlospai quoted in the note above. Quatrains in ljo6ahdttr, however, contained alternating lines of four and three stresses, e.g.:

Deyr fe, deyia froendr, deyr siAlfr it sama.

For a full discussion of Germanic meters and their history, see Winfred P. Lehmann, The Development of Germanic Verse Form (Austin, 1956).

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Secondly, the Poetic Edda is the direct source for a number of specific scenes in the Ring. The awakening of Briannhilde in Sieg- fried, act III, sc. 3, in which Wagner quotes al- most directly from Ettmifiler, is certainly the most famous; the parallel passages have been cited by generations of Ring source-hunters.18 Equally clear is the resemblance between the dialogue of Siegfried and the dying Fafner with the Old Norse Fdfnismdal.19 Understandably, Wagnerians have concentrated mostly on the latter half of the Codex Regius collection, the so-called Heldenlieder, many of which concern the Nibelung cycle and are thus analogues to the important Vilsunga Saga. But Wagner also knew the G6tterlieder, the opening poems of mythological lore. A notable example is the di- alogue in Siegfried, act I, when the Wanderer and Mime wager their heads in a contest of knowledge. There are numerous parallels to this scene in the Gdtterlieder of the Edda, the most obvious being the Vaffrudnismdl, a sim- ilar contest between a disguised Oinn and a giant, which O6inn wins by posing a question answerable only by himself. Moreover, the gnomic quality of the Wanderer's speeches, both in this scene and indeed throughout the opera, is derivative of Oinn's proverbial utter- ances in the eddic Hdvamdl. Further instances of Wagner's use of the Edda could be adduced almost ad infinitum. Indeed, it might be said without great exaggeration that there is hardly a poem in the eddic collection lacking some sort of Wagnerian parallel, motif, or theme. In short, much of the plot of Der Ring des Nibe- lungen is virtually inconceivable in its present form without this vital eddic source.

But the third, and perhaps the most inter- esting, influence of the Poetic Edda upon the Ring's literary quality is in Wagner's new atti- tude toward language, for the Ring poem re- veals a sensitivity to words that is new in Wag- ner's corpus. His abundant use of alliterative doublets, puns, etymologies, and neologisms is unprecedented. There is simply nothing in the texts of Wagner's previous operas, from Die

Feen through Lohengrin, that prepares the lis- tener for the astonishing lexical richness of the Ring poems. This revaluation of the lexicon is, I propose, a result of Wagner's study of the Edda and the cultural and linguistic substratum that he uncovered there, both in the poems them- selves and in the secondary sources (most no- tably the books of Jacob Grimm) that he used to assist in comprehending them.

During his Dresden period and the early years in Zurich, Wagner made himself a master of Norse eddic mythology. His own Dresden li- brary (half of which was devoted to medieval literature and history), those of others from whom he borrowed, and the acquaintance of such scholars as Ettmiiller in Zurich, Dr. Grisse, royal librarian in Dresden, and philolo- gist Samuel Wehrs in Paris, all promoted his in- tellectual development in Germanic studies. Certainly among the most crucial of such influ- ences were the works of Jacob Grimm, whose groundbreaking Deutsche Grammatik (1818, 1822) and Deutsche Mythologie (1835), as well as his brother Wilhelm's somewhat less heavy- weight Deutsche Heldensage (1829), were virtual encyclopedias of cultural, literary, lin- guistic, and mythological lore. The Ring is heavily indebted to Jacob Grimm for the dis- tinctive German character which Wagner im- parts to his Norse sources. Like Grimm, Wagner sought in the corpus of Scandinavian literature the clues to reconstruct the relics of a lost German national past. Even many years later, Wagner still praised Grimm's "incompa- rable achievements," noting that the My- thology "does indeed open up to one an entire world."20 In fact, Wagner's knowledge of Grimm's Mythology was so keen that even in seemingly minor details, as in the four beasts that Hagen instructs the vassals to slaughter for the gods (G6tterddmmerung, act II, sc. 3), the sacrifice is in each case the appropriate one, as described by Grimm: an ox to Wotan, boar to Froh, goat to Donner, and sheep for Fricka. These mythological and literary studies, with their emphasis on the etymology and explica- tion of Germanic names and words, opened for Wagner an entirely new realm of lexicon em-

18Wiessner, Der Stabreimvers, p. 8. See also Deryck Cooke, I Saw the World End: A Study of Wagner's Ring (London, 1979), p. 75. 19Cooke, I Saw the World End, p. 109. 20Cosima's Diaries, 14 January 1871, I, 321.

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There is, moreover, evidence that Wagner had at least some competence in Old Icelandic to provide him with a first-hand glimpse into the philological richness of Norse. This claim has often been denied when biographers cite Mein Leben: "To the extent that it was pos- sible, without fluent knowledge of the Scandi- navian languages, I tried to get to know the Eddas as well as the prose fragments com- prising the basis for large parts of these [Nibe- lung] legends."21 The acid pen of Robert Gutman writes, "Throughout his life he was a wretched linguist."22 But this is an exaggera- tion. Wagner came to be fluent in French and, at various points in his life and education, had studied Latin, Greek, English, and Italian, with varying degrees of facility in each. Curt von Westernhagen brings forth persuasive evidence that "Wagner must have acquired a good enough command of Old Norse to be able to un- derstand the original texts, using von der Hagen's translation as a crib.'"23 In the autobio- graphical passage, Wagner says that he lacks "fluent knowledge" in Old Norse, which cer- tainly implies some acquaintance with it. He could, after all, read Middle High German and could do so before he wrote Tannhduser in 1842-43.24 Nor did he allow his studies in me- dieval German to lapse; as Wagner wrote to Nietzsche, the very first line of Rheingold, the onomatopoeic "Weia! Waga!" is taken from the Middle High German heilawdic, meaning "the holy water."25-

As for Old Norse, the language is not partic- ularly difficult, and any student of Wagner's linguistic ability and knowledge of Grimm's Grammar could make at least some sense of it. In fact, his Dresden library contained one poem

in a dual-language edition of Norse and German (about which more later). Moreover, Wagner continued these studies in later years; the Wahn- fried library contained Ettmiiller's Altnordi- sches Lesebuch and Wimmer's Altnordische Grammatik. In his 1871 epilogue to the Ring poem, Wagner almost casually reveals his knowledge of the First Germanic Sound Shift (the familiar "Grimm's Law" that explains the phonetic derivation of Proto-Germanic conso- nants from Indo-European) in an analogy which likens Tristan and Isolde with Siegfried and Brtinnhilde, "just as in languages the transmu- tation of a single sound forms two apparently quite diverse words from one and the same orig- inal."26 Peter Branscombe is surely correct when he remarks that "Wagner's facility with words, especially in the Ring, is based on the feel for language of a born philologist."27

This acquaintance, then, of Wagner with eddic mythology and language has a powerful effect on the vocabulary of the Ring poem. Con- sider, for instance, some of the names in the Ring that Wagner created, such as those of the Rhine-daughters and Valkyries. The former are suggestively aqueous, both in sound and sense: Flosshilde ("fin-fighter"), Wellgunde ("wave- battler"), Woglinde ("she who turns back the waves"); and the latter suitably bellicose: Grimgerde ("bloody spear"), Helmwige ("hel- met-warrior"), Ortlinde ("she who turns the spear-point"), etc.28 Siegmund's various appel- lations for himself reveal a similar facility: Friedmund ("guardian of peace"), Frohwalt ("ruled by happiness"), Wehwalt ("ruled by sor- row").29 The change of the familiar Wodan to Wotan recalls the etymological connection (bolstered by Grimm) between the name of the chief god and one of his primary characteristics, Wut ("wrath"); and likewise the etymologi- cally apt pun in Die Walkiire, act III, sc. 3, be-

21Richard Wagner, My Life, trans. Andrew Gray and Mary Whittall (Cambridge, 1983), p. 343. 22Robert W. Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, and His Music (New York, 1968; rpt. 1972), p. 19. 23Westernhagen, Wagner: A Biography, trans. Mary Whit- tall (Cambridge, 1978), p. 94; Paul Herrmann, Richard Wagner und der Stabreim (Hagen, 1883). 24See Eine Mitteilung an meine Freunde, in Ellis, Wagner's Prose, I, 312. 25Quoted in Westernhagen, Dresdener Bibliothek, pp. 32-33. One suspects, however, that in this passage Wagner is pulling the good professor's leg.

26Ellis, Wagner's Prose, III, 268. 27Branscombe, "Die Sprachliche Form," p. 189 (translation mine). 2"The names of seven of the Valkyries are Wagner's coin- ages; only Siegrune ("victory-rune") and Brtinnhilde ("she who fights in armor") are from the Edda. 29It is interesting to compare Wagner's practice in onomas- tics with that of the early Middle Ages; see Henry Bosley Woolf, The Old Germanic Principles of Name-Giving (Bal- timore, 1939).

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tween the noun Lohe ("flame") and Wagner's name Loge (also from Grimm) for the Norse demigod of fire, Loki.30 Wagner's numerous ar- chaisms are generally as correct philologically as his many puns are suggestive: Loge/Liige ("lie," Rheingold, sc. 2); Mime/Memme ("cow- ard," Siegfried, act I, sc. 2); Hagen/Hagedorn ("thornbush," Gdtterddmmerung, act II, sc. 3); the Rhine-daughters' lament, "Rheingold! / Reines Gold!" (Rheingold, sc. 4); the "gute Runen" that Siegfried fancies in the eyes of Gutrune (Gotterddmmerung, act I, sc. 2); and Fasolt's memorable couplet, "Freia, die holde, / Holda, die freie" (Rheingold, sc. 2).31 In the last act of Die Walkiire, Briinnhilde plays pun- ningly on the origin of the name she gives the future Siegfried: "Siegfried erfreu sich des Siegs" ("Victory's achiever shall rejoice in his victory"). And earlier in the same opera, she puns on the etymology of the term Walkiire ("chooser of the slain") when (in the Todes- verkiindigung) she sings to Siegmund, "zur Wal kor ich ihn mir."32 The Ring even uses the eddic device of the kenning, when Woglinde speaks of the Rhinegold as "der Wassertiefe / wonnigem Stern" ("the wondrous star of the watery deeps," Rheingold, sc. 1), a phrase which, though original, could easily have come from an Icelandic skald.33

To summarize the argument to this point: Wagner called heavily upon the Edda to enrich the texture of his poem through metrical form, detail, and language. As a result, his conscious effort to imitate the style of the Edda adds sig- nificantly to the overall tone and effect of the drama. The Ring is the most stylistically com- plex of all of Wagner's poems, and the literary model in this case is clearly the Poetic Edda.

II But a larger issue remains unaccounted for:

the cosmology of the Ring. As generations of critics have pointed out, Wagner's unique achievement in the narrative of the Ring is the linking of the death of Siegfried with the fall of the gods. Wagner's poem encloses the story of the Wilsungs with what Volker Mertens has so felicitously called "a synthetic world-myth," placing the heroic story in an epic frame.34 And it is my contention that the most likely inspi- ration for this world-myth of the Ring is the opening poem of the Poetic Edda, the Volospd.

That Wagner had read the V0lospa ("The

Wise-Woman's Prophecy") and recalled it in writing and composing the Ring is beyond dis- pute. (He even insisted on a preferred spelling: Vilu-Spa.35) It would appear most likely that he knew the poem primarily from Ettmfiller's sep- arate edition of it (1830), the dual-language, Norse-German text alluded to above, which was part of his Dresden library.36 It contained

"oAlso noted by Cooke, I Saw the World End, pp. 127-28, 172. "3Grimm (Deutsche Mythologie, chap. 13) notes several parallels between Freia and the agricultural goddess Holda, but their explicit identification here seems to be original. Wagner had earlier mentioned Holda in the shepherd's song of Tannhduser, act II, sc. 3: "Frau Holda kam aus dem Berg hervor." She is better known as Frau Holle of the fairy-tale, whose shaking of her feather bed causes the snowfall (Kinder- und Hausmdrchen, no. 24). On Wagner's mythological wordplay generally, see Hans von Wolzogen, Die Sprache in Richard Wagner's Dichtungen (3rd edn. Leipzig, 1889), esp. pp. 31-32. 32See Cosima's Diaries, 22 July 1873, I, 514, for Wagner's comment on this line. -1The term kenning comes to us via the second section of Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda, where it is explained as a two-part characterizing periphrasis providing a novel po- etic term for a common object. Kennings in Old English are fairly straightforward ("whale-road" = the sea, "God's candle" = the sun, etc.). Norse skaldic kennings, however, can be of extraordinary complexity; one skald, for example, describes "memory" as munknarrar skut ("the mind- ship's back-cabin"). For a full discussion, see Hertha Mar- quardt, Die altenglischen Kenningar (Halle, 1938); and Ru- dolf Meifner, Die Kenningar der Skalden (Bonn and Leipzig, 1921).

"4Volker Mertens, "Richard Wagner und das Mittelalter," in Wagner Handbuch, ed. Mfiller and Wapnewski, pp. 19-59. The phrase quoted here, "Wagners synthetischer Welt-Mythos," appears on p. 38. 3-Cosima's Diaries, 6 June 1878, II, 87. Wagner's spelling, by the way, is correct according to textbook rules of nor- malized orthography (the -u indicates a genitive singular), although now printed without the hyphen separating the elements of the compound: V61uspa. This minor instance is but another indication of Wagner's familiarity with Old Icelandic language. "36Ludwig Ettmuiller, Vaulu-Spd. Das dlteste Denkmal germ anisch-nordischer Sprache, nebst einigen Gedanken iiber Nordens Wissen und Glauben und nordische Dicht- kunst (Leipzig, 1830). Ettmuiller's Norse text modifies somewhat the ordering of stanzas from Codex Regius (and Neckel/Kuhn), placing sts. 37, 38, 36, and 39 (in that order) after st. 29; Ettmfiller considers the controversial final stanza (66), telling of the (re?)appearance of the dragon, as part of the ragnarok, situating it before st. 57. He prints sts. 65 and 64 (again in that order) in an appendix as later Christian additions. These changes do not affect the inter- pretation of Volospd offered below.

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an introduction, Norse text, German metrical translation (both with textual apparatus), end- notes, commentary, tables of characters, and a Norse glossary. The Vdlospd is a sort of Viking Book of Revelation, taking the form of a mono- logue spoken to O&inn by a prophetess (Old Norse valva, derived from the vilr, the magic wand that she holds). Though the text is ram- bling and allusive rather than strictly narrative, approximately its first half tells of the origin of the world and the second of its destruction in the ragnarik, or fall of the gods. The Vblospd is Snorri's, as well as Grimm's, primary text for Norse cosmology and their retellings of the ragnardk story.

Several obvious and often-cited elements in the Vilospd indicate Wagner's familiarity with it. Chief among these is the character of Erda, so named hypothetically by Grimm (Deutsche Mythologie, chap. 13) for the earth-goddess oth- erwise known only in Tacitus's famous refer- ence to the goddess Nerthus (Germania, chap. 40). Wagner has Wotan also address Erda by her title, or office as it were, the German Wala, likewise the hypothetical reconstruction of Grimm from the Norse vilva. Frequently re- ferred to in the Ring, Erda also makes two memorable appearances there, in Rheingold, sc. 4 and Siegfried, act III, sc. 1, where, just as in the Vilospd itself, the seeress advises or warns Wotan about his future and how he can or cannot avoid his fate. These scenes also recall another eddic poem (not in Codex Regius), Baldrs Draumar ("Balder's Dreams"), a brief di- alogue between an Erda-like figure and the chief of the gods; most Norse scholars have concluded, however, that Baldrs Draumar is derivative from the Vdlospd, not an indepen- dent analogue.

Furthermore, phrases from at least three pas- sages in the Vilospd seem to be paraphrased in certain lines of the Ring. The v61va's refrain (in Ettmtiller's Norse), "vitib er, enn ebr hvat?" translated by Ettmtiller as "Weisst ihr-doch aber was? ", returns in the similar refrain of Wagner's Norns, "Weisst du was aus ihm wird?" (G6tterdiimmerung, Vorspiel). Simi- larly, Erda's "Wie alles war, weiss ich" of Rheingold, sc. 4, may reflect Ettmtiiller's "Alles weiss ich, Othinn" (Vdlospd, st. 28). Somewhat more distant is Ettmtiller's translation of the

valva's question in the same stanza, "Was fragt ihr mich, warum versuch ihr mich!" and its re- lationship to several similar lines of Erda in Siegfried.

Wagner's making the Valkyries sisters to the Norns, both groups the daughters of Erda, is also derived from the Valospd (as Wolfgang Golther and later Deryck Cooke have no- ticed).37 In the Norse text, one of the Valkyries shares a name, Sculd, with the youngest of the Norns (Vilospd, sts. 20, 30). Cooke (p. 145) fur- ther cites Valospd, stanza 24, where O0inn hurls his spear at the enemy, as one of the sources for Wotan's weapon, though the simi- larity seems remote, since Oinn's spear Gungnir is commonplace in Norse myth. Yet Wagnerians have failed to emphasize the fact that the ash tree of Hunding's hut, and from which Siegmund pulls the sword Nothung, is an oak in the Vblsunga Saga. The Vilospa states (in st. 17) that the first man and woman were named Ash and Elm. Perhaps Wagner re- called this fact when he created his first human characters in the Ring, Siegmund and Sieglinde in Die Walkiire, and situated them under an ash tree. Furthermore, the ash of Die Walkfire recalls the Weltesche of Wagner's world-myth, and in the Vilospd too the world-ash Yggdrasil plays an important function as cosmological symbol.38 And one other detail might be added. In G6tterddmmerung, act I, sc. 3, Waltraute tells of an ominous council of the gods held in Valhalla as they await their end. A similar scene is described in four stanzas of incre- mental refrain in the Vblospd (6, 9, 23, 25) as the gods meet together to establish their au- thority over the new creation.

37Wolfgang Golther, Die sagengeschichtlichen Grund- lagen der Ringdichtung Richard Wagners (Berlin, 1902), pp. 82-83; Cooke, I Saw the World End, p. 228. 38Wagner himself seems to call attention to the analogy between the two ash trees (that of Hunding's hut and the Weltesche) in Walkiire, act II, sc. 3, when the hysterical Sieglinde shouts, "die Esche sttirzt- / es bricht der Stamm!" She seems to believe that Hunding's tree will collapse when the sword Nothung, taken from it, is shat- tered. Yet in the end it is the Weltesche itself which withers and dies at the stroke of Nothung, when later wielded by her son Siegfried upon Wotan's spear, derived from the Weltesche.

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On a somewhat higher literary level, it would seem that the Vdlospd might appeal to Wagner in two further ways. First, the Norse poem is a monologue, a dramatic form offering interesting suggestions of how mythological matters might be handled in Wagner's own dra- matic work, as in the long and thematically crucial monologue of Wotan in Walkiire, act II, sc. 2. And second, the Vdlospd would suggest to Wagner the inherently dramatic form that he felt was present in all early verse. In Das Kunst- werk der Zukunft (1850), he states:

But before these epic songs became the object of much literary care, they had flourished mid the Folk, eked out by voice and gesture, as a bodily- enacted Art-work; as it were, a fixed and crystallized blend of lyric song and dance, with predominant lin- gering on portrayal of the action and reproduction of the lyric dialogue.39

In this passage, Wagner could easily be speaking of a performance of Vilospd, sung, harped, and mimed in the Middle Ages. The in- fluence of this image, and just such poems as he might imagine the Vdlospa to be, is clear enough in his own works, as the orchestra, like the great Anglo-Saxon harp of Sutton-Hoo, links together his alliterative verses in music and speech, chord and word.

In the Vdlospd, the prophetess speaks the Vi- king wisdom of the ages, the cyclical rise and fall of the world. So too does Wagner's Ring. "Mark well my new poem," Wagner wrote to Liszt in 1853; "it contains the world's begin- ning and its end."40 Surely every perceptive lis- tener to the prelude in Das Rheingold hears in that famous E& triad something primordial, perhaps the creation itself.41 Appropriately, that same triad with its ascending arpeggio be- comes associated with Erda; and in scene 4 of the same opera, as Erda sings her prophecy of

the fall of the gods, this arpeggio is inverted to create a musical theme suggesting the world's destruction. Similarly, the great crescendo near the end of G6tterddmmerung that represents the fall of Gibichung hall and the supernatural events that accompany the cremation of Sieg- fried and Briinnhilde surely intimates to the lis- tener the destruction of a larger world. In 1872, as he was composing these bars of music, Wagner remarked to his wife that he "must now compose his verses for the end of the world," and a year later he played for her "The End of the World" from the opera.42

As observed above, it is only in Wagner that the gods are responsible for Siegfried's death and that this death in turn brings down ragnar6k upon the gods. But this was not al- ways Wagner's intention. Though some con- nection of the Siegfried story with the gods was in Wagner's mind from the beginning-most notably in the protosketch for the Ring known as Der Nibelungen-Mythus als Entwurf zu einem Drama (1848)-in the early drafts it was all handled very differently, especially in its conclusion. In the first version of the poem Siegfrieds Tod (later to become G6tterddmmer- ung), Siegfried's murder and Brtinnhilde's im- molation are atonements for the sins of the gods, who survive in glory. "Nur einer herrsche": Briinnhilde was to have sung, "Al- vater! Herrlicher du! / Freue dich des freiesten Helden!"43 She then ascends to Valhalla, once again in the form of a Valkyrie, triumphantly leading Siegfried to life eternal with the immor- tals. The Nibelung-Myth sketch for this pas- sage, with its unmistakable Christological im- agery, makes Wagner's intention even clearer: "Hear then, ye glorious gods," says Brtinnhilde, "your wrong is expiated! Thank him, the hero, who took your fault upon himself!"44

39Ellis, Wagner's Prose, I, 135. 40Wagner to Liszt, 11 February 1853; in Spencer and Mill- ington, Selected Letters, p. 281. 41As Warren Darcy observes, "Wagner obviously intended the Rheingold to function on one level as a musical met- aphor for the creation of the world" ("The Pessimism of the Ring," Opera Quarterly 4 [1986], 41).

42Cosima's Diaries, 20 July 1872, I, 513; 10 September 1873, I, 673. 43Wagner, Sdmtliche Schriften und Dichtungen (Leipzig, 1900-16), II, 227. "Only one shall rule: / All-father! Thou in thy glory! / Have joy of the freest of heroes" (Ellis, Wag- ner's Prose, VIII, 50). 44Art, Life and Theories of Richard Wagner, ed. and trans. Edward L. Burlingame (2nd edn. New York, 1909), p. 254. The first draft of this essay (under the title Die Nibelun- gensage [Mythus]) is printed in Strobel, Skizzen und Ent- wiirfe pp. 23-33; the published version is in the Sdmtliche Schriften, II, 156-66.

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Exactly what happened to Wagner in the two and a half years between November 1848 (when the first version of the poem Siegfrieds Tod was completed) and the summer of 1851 (when a radically different interpretation of the Nibe- lung story becomes apparent in his writing) we will probably never know for certain. The failure of the Dresden uprising, his exile, his loss of the only permanent professional post he would ever hold, and the growing disintegra- tion of his first marriage all played a part in a pervasive pessimism and spirit of renunciation that darkened the optimism of the first Ring poem. In any case, by the time the second Ni- belung drama, Der junge Siegfried, came to be written in 1851, the ultimate intent of the cycle was completely changed, and the plunging for- tunes of Wotan came to have equal weight with the career of the ever-innocent Siegfried. It is as if Wagner had metamorphosed during this pe- riod from the worldly ends of Marx (where the existing order is capable of salvation) to the spiritual resignation of Schopenhauer (where it is not). Yet Wagner was not actually to read Schopenhauer until 1854. In Mein Leben, Wagner wrote about the subconscious simi- larity between his poem and Schopenhauer, and his own anticipation there of the philoso- pher's theories.45 Indeed, Schopenhauer's pessi- mism is not so far from the world-weariness of the eddas themselves. In the words of the Hd- vamdl, the poem which follows the Vdlospd:

A measure of wisdom each man shall have But never too much let him know;

Let no man the fate before him see, For so is he freest from sorrow.46

Or in the justly famous terse refrain from the same poem: "Cattle die and kinsmen die, / And so one dies one's self."47 Sentiments such as these abound in Die Welt als Wille und Vorstel- lung.

The first suggestion of Wagner's new fatal- istic world-myth occurs in the preliminary sketch for Der junge Siegfried in May 1851.

There, in Wagner's embryonic ideas for Sieg- fried, act III, one reads: "Wotan und die Wala: g6tterende. "48 Thus, for the first time, Wagner links Siegfried, Wotan, and the cataclysmic ragnar6k. Appropriate changes were made in Siegfrieds Tod to suit this new scheme, and by year's end of 1852 all four dramas of the philo- sophically recast Ring were complete and re- vised for private publication.

What happened to Wagner to bring about this revision remains a private mystery. How the revision occurred, however, may be more comprehensible, for most of the elements of the revision and mythic expansion of the Ring lay readily at hand in the Vblospd. This simple but obvious point has I think been neglected by Wagnerian scholars in their preoccupation with the details of Wagner's sources rather than their larger structures. Critics, unlike Wagner him- self, often have overlooked the fact that Wag- ner's sources-the V61sunga Saga, bidreks Saga, the Edda, and the like - exist as indepen- dent works of art, complete and entire unto themselves, not just as treasure-hoards of lit- erary lore waiting to be plundered by one Ri- chard Wagner.49

III A look at the overall structure of Vblospa

should demonstrate what Wagner found there as a model, an archetype, for his own world- myth in the Ring. Essentially, the Vdlospd is in seven narrative sections:

1. Creation, sts. 1-16

2. The institution of man and the fates, sts. 17-20

3. Corruption through gold and world war, sts. 21-26

4"Wagner, My Life, p. 510. 46Hdvamdl, st. 56; translation is from Henry Adams Bel- lows, The Poetic Edda (New York, 1923; rpt. 1969), pp. 39-40. 47The Old Norse for this couplet is quoted in n. 17 above.

48Strobel, Skizzen und Entwiirfe, p. 66. 49Gutman does draw some attention to the union of V1l- sunga Saga and Volospd as producing "a new and fateful mythology" (p. 179). Also, in the program booklet for the 1988 Bayreuth Rheingold, Ulrich Milller prints a text and translation of the Vdlospd with a brief note clarifying the term ragnar6k. But otherwise the subject of V1olospd and the larger structure of the Ring go wanting. Doubtless, had Cooke lived to complete his magisterial torso I Saw the World End, the influence of the Vdlospd upon Wagner would have been fully explored.

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4. The need of O6inn and the gods as a result of this corruption, sts. 27-30 (At this point the Vblospd adopts a refrain to suggest a major shift in subject, from primal innocence to anxious experience.)

5. The death of the world-hero Balder, sts. 31-35

6. The resulting ragnarok, sts. 36-58

7. The world's rebirth in innocence, sts. 59-65.

It can be no coincidence that this is almost ex- actly Wagner's pattern as well, though he in- verts the order of numbers 2 and 3, the creation of man and the corruption through gold. The eddic creation of a world of innocence (no. 1) is analogous to the Rheingold prelude and the opening of scene 1. The corruption through gold (no. 3) is Alberich's theft, then Wotan's (Rheingold, scs. 1 and 3-4), both of which ac- tions result in a rift in the world order. The in- stitution of man (no. 2) is Wotan's "great idea" late in scene 4. This point is made even clearer in Die Walkiire, especially the long monologue in the second act, when Wotan explains the Gdtternot, the "need of the gods," for redemp- tion (no. 4).

Number 5, Balder, is more complex. But I am far from the first to suggest an analogy between Balder and Siegfried. Golther, Weston, Cooke, and Benevinga have elaborated the point suffi- ciently as to require but a cursory explanation here.50 Golther even argues for a specific source for the conflation of Siegfried with Balder in Franz Mone's treatise Einleitung in das Nibe- lungenlied (1818), which Wagner may have read. Suffice it to say that both Balder and Sieg- fried have solar qualities (Siegfried is often lik- ened in Wagner's imagery to the sun), both are invulnerable except in one aspect, both are the offspring of the god, and both are murdered through family ties. But Balder's death brings on directly the ragnardk. And here Wagner in- troduces his most brilliant innovation into the

Siegfried narrative, with a similar linking of the hero and the gods' fall. In Brtinnhilde's words:

Durch deine tapferste Tat, dir so tauglich erwiinscht,

weihtest du den, der sie gewirkt,

dem Fluche, dem du verfielest.51

That Wagner himself consciously linked Sieg- fried and Balder is strongly implied in his de- leting from the prose sketch of Der junge Sieg- fried a specific reference to Balder.52 Thus, while retaining the imagery of conflation with Balder, Wagner exalts Siegfried as the only hero in the drama connected with the sorrow of the gods and their fate.

Wagner's ragnar6k (no. 6) is a cursory affair compared to the titanic struggle that we read in the Vdlospd and Snorri's Prose Edda.53 But, pace Deryck Cooke and certain others,54 it is there nevertheless: implied in the burning of Valhalla in the scenic background, but most of all in the music itself, a last restatement of the mighty Valhalla theme. So certain was Wagner that his audience would comprehend the impli- cations of this complex finale that he retitled the opera-without internal explanation- Gdtterddmmerung.55 And as every medievalist knows, this is the infamous misconstruction of the eddic ragna rdk ("gods' fate") with its ho-

5?Golther, p. 95; Cooke, I Saw the World End, p. 241; Jessie Weston, Legends of the Wagner Trilogy, supplement to The Volsunga Saga, trans. Eirikr Magnisson and William Morris (London, 1905; rpt. 1911), p. 202; Nancy Benevinga, Kingdom on the Rhine: History, Myth and Legend in Wagner's Ring (Harwich, 1983), pp. 111-16.

S51Gtterddmmerung, act III, sc. 3; or in Andrew Porter's trans., The Ring of the Nibelung (New York, 1976):

By his most valiant deed he fulfilled your desire,

but he was forced to share in your curse-

that curse which has doomed your downfall (p. 326). 52"Um der g6tter ende sorgen die g6tter, seit Balder sank der holdeste gott." The passage appears in the full prose sketch of Der lunge Siegfried; Strobel, Skizzen und Ent- wiirfe p. 88. 53For a convenient summary, see John Stanley Martin, Ragnargk: An Investigation into Old Norse Concepts of the Fate of the Gods, Melbourne Monographs in Germanic Studies 3 (Assen, 1972). 54"Ragnarok .. . is nothing like Wagner's 'G6tterddmmer- ung'," Cooke, I Saw the World End, p. 240. 55The only appearance of the term Gotterddmmerung out- side of the title of the last opera is near the close of the final duet in Siegfried (Dover score, p. 433, syst. 1, mm. 2-3). A similar phraseology (including an ingenious word- play on dammern as both sunrise and sunset), however, oc- curs on at least three occasions in the text, e.g., Erda's "Ein dilst'rer Tag / ddmmert den G6ttern" (Rheingold sc. 4); cf. the Third Nornin the GdtterddmmerungVorspiel andBrinn- hilde in act III, sc. 3, of the same opera.

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mophone (at least in the accusative case) ragna rdkkr ("gods' twilight").56 The word Gdtter- ddmmerung is attested in German as early as 1772, and Wagner was surely confident that in both his title and in this final scene, his audi- ence would comprehend its significance, both literally and metaphorically.57

Yet the Ring does not end with the fading away of the Valhalla theme and the broken curse, but with the return of a musical phrase iterated only once before in the last act of Die Walkiire and sung by Sieglinde to the words "O herstes Wunder." There it is associated with the self-sacrifice of Briinnhilde and the promise of the birth of Siegfried. In the final measures of G6tterddmmerung, in addition to these recol- lections, surely it is easy to hear as well a sug- gestion of the final section of the Vdlospd, re- birth (no. 7), as the great cycle of history begins anew.

To summarize, then: it is my hypothesis that the Norse Vdlospd provided Wagner with the essential structure of the world-myth which distinguishes the Ring from all other Ni- belung dramas. In this sense, the Vdlospd be- comes a source of importance equivalent to the Vdlsunga Saga itself: the saga for narrative plot, the eddic poem for cosmic theme. But how much of this material, one must wonder, would Wagner's audience have understood? To what degree was he dependent on audience recogni- tion of his underlying source materials? Critics generally have fallen into two camps on this issue: those (such as Michael Ewans) who deny to Wagner's nineteenth-century audience any prior knowledge of Norse subjects; and those who (like Jessie Weston) castigate Wagner for not being Nordic enough and instigating mod- ifications unfaithful to the familiar originals. As usual, the truth is somewhere in between.

Wagner takes certain items for granted: a basic knowledge of the gods and their identities, for example; and an understanding (as discussed above) of the nature and significance of the Twilight of the Gods. Even as early as the second act of Lohengrin, Wagner can have his Ortrud swear to Wodan and Freia, in full confi- dence that his audiences will understand the allusion - certainly putting to rest Ewans's de- nial that "the Nordic gods and goddesses were strange to the nineteenth-century audience."5s Yet at the same time, nowhere does Wagner de- mand a knowledge of the Norse narrative mate- rials per se-much as his poem repays their study. It was never Wagner's idea to compete with the sagas, as Jessie Weston implies (p. 227) when she says of Gdtterddmmerung, "the drama is distinctly inferior to either the Volsunga-saga or the Nibelungen-lied."

In fact, the Nibelungenlied was probably the only Siegfried story that Wagner could be rea- sonably assured that his audiences did know; it had been heralded by Jacob Bodmer as a Ger- manic Iliad as early as 1756 and was pervasive in German culture since the Romantic move- ment at the turn of the century. But Wagner de- liberately adopts a plot often radically at vari- ance with the Nibelungenlied's version of the Siegfried story. Moreover, by publishing his Ring poem (privately in 1853 and publicly ten years later) Wagner systematically built an in- formed audience for his operas, just as Ten- nyson was doing in England with short Arthu- rian lyrics preparing his readers for the full heady brew of Idylls of the King. In print, Wag- ner's drama even became something of the lit- erary rage in Germany. "Since R[ichard] welded the Edda myths into his Ring," Cosima quips bitterly in her diary, "everyone has been making plays of them."'9 In his 1871 epilogue to the poem, Wagner discusses at amusing length the great congregations of his imitators who tried their hands at the Siegfried story- even, he says, "a rhapsodist among them, to go about the country giving very lively readings of whole cycles of Nibelungen-epics, clad com-

6'The confusion of the two (which can be traced as far back as the Edda itself) was pervasive in the nineteenth cen- tury; Wagner's mentor Ettmfiller was among the few to get it right, in his translation and glossary to the V61ospd: "der G6tter Untergang." "5The word G6tterddmmerung was originally borrowed not from Norse but from the French "crdpuscule des dieux"; similar German phrases had already appeared ("Abend der G6tter" in 1755 and "Dimmerung der G6tter" in 1766). The English "Twilight of the Gods" likewise ap- pears about the same time, being first attested in Thomas Gray's poem "The Descent of Odin" in 1768.

58Michael Ewans, Wagner and Aeschylus: The Ring and the Oresteia (Cambridge, 1982), p. 58. 59Cosima's Diaries, 22 January 1870, I, 183.

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pletely in the primal garment of the Edda." Such self-conscious medievalizing is as far as possible from Wagner's intent, which empha- sized in the stories "their purely-human ele- ment, so close to our own hearts, instead of mere regard for their value as curiosities."'60

To Wagner, the Middle Ages, the world of the sagas, the Edda, and Nibelungenlied, were not fairy-land, a realm of escape, as it was, for example, to Ludwig II. It was rather a field in which to explore contemporary - and eternal -

problems. So too with his use of source mate- rials. The Ring is not a dramatized Vdlospd any more than a theatrical Vilsunga Saga. Instead, these medieval works of art are used to create something new and entirely different. That readers today continue to approach the Edda and the Nibelungenlied from a Wagnerian per- spective (or, for that matter, Gottfried or Wol-

fram from Wagner's Tristan and Parsifal) is a great tribute to Wagner's genius; but it says nothing about these medieval masterpieces themselves.61

The study of Wagner's eddic sources allows a fascinating glimpse into the workshop of his mind, as he assimilates these and other medi- eval works into a coherent and fluid whole, uni- fied above all by the cosmic myth of the Vd- lospd. The Ring did not spring ex nihilo but is a masterly construction from the models of pre- vious masters. Wolfgang Schadewald has written of the Ring poem in an enviable phrase: "eine Ursch6pfung aus Vorgeformten"-an original creation from something already formed.62 Could Wagner's creative process in the Ring, and its shaping of the synthetic world-myth from the Norse masterpiece

, the Volospd, be more aptly described? -

60Ellis, Wagner's Prose, III, 262-63. An interesting essay on this subject is Wolfgang Friihwald, "Wandlungen eines Nationalmythos: Der Weg der Nibelungen ins 19. Jahrhun- dert," in Wege des Mythos in der Moderne: Richard Wagner, "Der Ring des Nibelungen": Eine Miinchner Ringvorlesung, ed. Dieter Borchtmeyer (Munich, 1987), pp. 17-40.

61Contrast A. T. Hatto's frenzied denunciation: Wagner "has unfortunately harmed the cause of medieval German poetry by intruding reckless distortions between us and an ancient masterpiece" (foreword to his trans. of the Nibe- lungenlied [Harmondsworth, 1969], p. 7). 62Hellas und Hesperien (2nd edn. Zurich, 1970); I am in- debted to Ewans (p. 78) for this reference.

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