le that only the hero, when
in the fulness of time he appears upon earth, will venture through it;
and the problem is solved. Wotan, with a breaking heart, takes leave
of Brynhild; throws her into a deep sleep; covers her with her long
warshield; summons Loki, who comes in the shape of a wall of fire
surrounding the mountain peak; and turns his back on Brynhild for ever.

The allegory here is happily not so glaringly obvious to the younger
generations of our educated classes as it was forty years ago. In those
days, any child who expressed a doubt as to the absolute truth of the
Church's teaching, even to the extent of asking why Joshua told the
sun to stand still instead of telling the earth to cease turning, or of
pointing out that a whale's throat would hardly have been large enough
to swallow Jonah, was unhesitatingly told that if it harboured such
doubts it would spend all eternity after its death in horrible torments
in a lake of burning brimstone. It is difficult to write or read
this nowadays without laughing; yet no doubt millions of ignorant and
credulous people are still teaching their children that. When Wagner
himself was a little child, the fact that hell was a fiction devised for
the intimidation and subjection of the masses, was a well-kept secret of
the thinking and governing classes. At that time the fires of Loki
were a very real terror to all except persons of exceptional force of
character and intrepidity of thought. Even thirty years after Wagner
had printed the verses of The Ring for private circulation, we find
him excusing himself from perfectly explicit denial of current
superstitions, by reminding his readers that it would expose him to
prosecution. In England, so many of our respectable voters are still
grovelling in a gloomy devil worship, of which the fires of Loki are
the main bulwark, that no Government has yet had the conscience or the
courage to repeal our monstrous laws against "blasphemy."

SIEGFRIED

Sieglinda, when she flies into the forest with the hero's son unborn in
her womb, and the broken pieces of his sword in her hand, finds shelter
in the smithy of a dwarf, where she brings forth her child and dies.
This dwarf is no other than Mimmy, the brother of Alberic, the same who
made for him the magic helmet. His aim in life is to gain possession of
the helmet, the ring, and the treasure, and through them to obtain that
Plutonic mastery of the world under the beginnings of w