re apt to pretend to understand great works of art
than to confess that the meaning (if any) has escaped us. Valtrauta,
however, betrays her irrelevance by explaining that the gods can
be saved by the restoration of the ring to the Rhine maidens. This,
considered as part of the previous allegory, is nonsense; so that even
this scene, which has a more plausible air of organic connection with
The Valkyries than any other in Night Falls On The Gods, is as clearly
part of a different and earlier conception as the episode which
concludes it, in which Siegfried actually robs Brynhild of her ring,
though he has no recollection of having given it to her. Night Falls On
The Gods, in fact, was not even revised into any real coherence with the
world-poem which sprang from it; and that is the authentic solution of
all the controversies which have arisen over it.

The Third Act

The hunting party comes off duly. Siegfried strays from it and meets
the Rhine maidens, who almost succeed in coaxing the ring from him. He
pretends to be afraid of his wife; and they chaff him as to her beating
him and so forth; but when they add that the ring is accursed and will
bring death upon him, he discloses to them, as unconsciously as Julius
Caesar disclosed it long ago, that secret of heroism, never to let your
life be shaped by fear of its end. [*] So he keeps the ring; and they leave
him to his fate. The hunting party now finds him; and they all sit
down together to make a meal by the river side, Siegfried telling them
meanwhile the story of his adventures. When he approaches the subject of
Brynhild, as to whom his memory is a blank, Hagen pours an antidote
to the love philtre into his drinking horn, whereupon, his memory
returning, he proceeds to narrate the incident of the fiery mountain, to
Gunther's intense mortification. Hagen then plunges his spear into the
back of Siegfried, who falls dead on his shield, but gets up again,
after the old operatic custom, to sing about thirty bars to his love
before allowing himself to be finally carried off to the strains of the
famous Trauermarsch.

* "We must learn to die, and to die in the fullest sense of
the word. The fear of the end is the source of all
lovelessness; and this fear is generated only when love
begins to wane. How came it that this loves the highest
blessedness to all things living, was so far lost sight of
by the human race that at last it came to this: