ds, he remarks: "I have
heard it reported, Siegfried, that you understand the language of
the birds. Is it true?" "I have not heeded their babble this many
a day--" Siegfried is saying, when Gunther's heavy and preoccupied
mien is borne upon him; he breaks off to reach him his drink-horn,
cheerily rallying him: "Drink, Gunther, drink! Your brother brings
it to you!" Gunther, oppressed by his dark doubt of Siegfried, is
not prompt in accepting the proffered cup. His reply obscurely
conveys his sense of some failure in their good-fellowship. Siegfried
takes it up merely to turn into occasion for one of his cordial
laughs. "You over-cheerful hero!" sighs Gunther. Something is wrong,
Siegfried cannot fail to see. He drops privately to Hagen his
interpretation of the friend's gloom: "Bruennhilde is giving him
trouble?" "If he understood her as well as you understand the song
of the birds!" Siegfried has an inspiration. Those last words of
Hagen's contain the germ of it. "Hei! Gunther!" he calls to the
blood-brother, who appears so sorely in need of cheering: "You
melancholy fellow! If you will thank me for it, I will sing you
tales from the days of my youth!"

Gunther's reply is politely encouraging. Hagen joins his invitation
to the half-brother's. The listeners place themselves at ease on
the ground about the narrator, seated in their midst on a mossy
stump. Then Siegfried, with his beautiful, bottomless zest in life,
recounts in vivid running sketches the story we know. One after
the other the familiar motifs pass in review. From them alone one
could reconstruct the tale. Of his childhood in Mime's cave, the
forging of Nothung, the slaying of the dragon. Of the wonder worked
by the drop of dragon's blood on the tongue, the little bird's good
counsel by which he won Tarnhelm and Ring, the same bird's warning
upon which he slew Mime. At this point, when we are wondering how,
with Bruennhilde wiped from his memory, he can proceed, Hagen hands
him a horn filled with wine, in which he has been seen expressing
the juice of an herb; this, the Nibelung's son, wise in the virtues
of simples, tells him, will sharpen his memory and bring close
remote events.

Siegfried takes the cup, but for a moment does not taste it, absorbed,
as is evident, in the effort to remember what came right after the
point in his story at which he just broke off. The forgetfulness-motif
suggests his baffled groping. Mechanically he sets the horn to
hi