The Nibelung’s Ring: The Valkyrie 1

Yes, I know we had a presidential election here in the US yesterday. The remarkable thing about it, after a campaign season so packed with improbabilities and absurdities, is that it was a normal election, with no more than the usual amount of vote fraud and a winner declared by sunrise. While everyone recovers from their hangovers, let’s continue with our discussion of The Nibelung’s Ring; those of my readers who are paying attention may notice that what we’re exploring may not be quite as unrelated to the current situation in the US, and elsewhere in the industrial world, as it might seem at first glance.

The first installment of our tale, The Rhinegold, set out the problem the remaining three operas will explore.  In the mythic language Wagner borrowed from Ludwig Feuerbach, this is straightforward enough:  now that the gold from the bottom of the Rhine has been turned into a ring of power, is there any way that Alberich’s deed can be undone and the gold restored to the Rhine, or will the ring continue to pass from hand to hand, bringing doom to everyone it touches? Translate into the language of pre-Marxian socialism and the question becomes one that we’re still dealing with today.

Central Europe in Wagner’s time was still reeling from the initial impacts of the process by which human relationships stopped being the basic glue of society, and were replaced by a process of commodification that reduced all other values into those denominated in money.  The older world of peasant village economics, governed by customary exchanges and community values, still survived in fragmentary form here and there in isolated rural areas, along with the folktales the Brothers Grimm and their friends collected so enthusiastically; the educated public, or that fraction of it that read works on cultural history, could learn all about the comparable world of urban community life, with its craft guilds and self-governing city-states, that had been swept away by industrialism.

It was heady stuff, and it made a harsh contrast with the world of economic and political centralization spreading rapidly across Europe from its English seedbed in Wagner’s time. That was particularly true, of course, for intellectuals who didn’t have any exposure to the sometimes bitter downsides of peasant life, with its narrow horizons, its stifling conformism, and its utter vulnerability to the vagaries of a fickle climate.  To them, and of course to their many equivalents in later eras, rural village life came to be repainted in the hues of utopia. (Those of my readers who’ve followed the modern neoprimitivist movement will have seen the same sort of portrayals of hunter-gatherer societies, by the same sort of people, for the same reasons.)

The implications of this backward view through rose-colored glasses are rarely understood these days, not least because quite a few more recent socialists have been eager to cover up the less doctrinally correct dimensions of their own heritage.  One of the major strains in pre-Marxist socialism, in fact, was profoundly conservative, even reactionary, in its focus. That form of socialism didn’t, as Marx and his followers did, cram the hoped-for transformation from capitalism to socialism into a theoretical scheme of social progress that defined socialism as the inevitable wave of the future. Instead, it portrayed capitalism as a temporary aberration, an intrusion into the natural scheme of things, which had to be swept away so that human society could find its way back to its normal state.

It’s not inappropriate, in fact, to refer to this sort of thinking as Traditionalist socialism. If you want to see it in full flower, the best English-language source is the writings of William Morris, which were mentioned earlier in this sequence of posts.  In place of Morris’s fine socialist utopian novel News from Nowhere, though, you’ll want to read his even better epic fantasy novel The Well at the World’s End, which features exactly the sort of sturdy peasant culture that Wagner and other German socialists dreamed about in the exciting days before the 1848-1849 rebellions. It’s worth the time to read it, as it has a great deal more to offer than a glimpse at the older socialism; it includes a critique (veiled in mythic allegories almost precisely parallel to Wagner’s) of the entire social and political situation of Morris’s time.

The Marxist movement appears in his story as the Fellowship of the Dry Tree, and the Dry Tree itself is the terrible symbol of the universe of scientific materialism expressed most clearly, in Morris’s time, in the writings of Charles Darwin. That largely defined the core innovations that Marx brought to socialism: he linked the socialist movement to the mythology of progress and tried to claim the prestige of nineteenth-century materialist science for his theories.  It was a clever move. Marx backed the winning horse in the late nineteenth century reality wars, and a later generation of socialists inspired by his theories rode that horse to temporary dominion over half the planet.  It’s a very minor consequence of all this that Wagner’s allegory has become almost impossible for many people nowadays to grasp.

Make the effort to step outside of the cult of progress and look at the world in a different way, and what Wagner was trying to say becomes much easier to follow. During the years when he worked up the old legend of the Nibelung treasure into the plot of four operas, he was passionately convinced of the truth of the narrative I sketched out earlier:  the idea that capitalism and its commodification of the world represented a temporary aberration, a breach in the natural order of things, that would go away forever if only its grip could once be broken. Alberich’s terrible deed marked the beginning of that aberration, but the folly of the gods and giants in falling into the same trap marked the point at which its jaws closed hard on the world. How could society break out of the trap, though? That was the question that he sought to answer using the paired tools of mythology and music.

I’ve mentioned before that one of the secrets behind the greatness of The Ring is that Wagner’s own ideas changed while he was writing and composing it. That’s important to watch here, but it’s also worth noting that Wagner started out with a clearer analysis than most of his (and our) contemporaries. Then as now, it’s standard for intellectuals to think of themselves as the forces for change that really matter, the ones whose ideas will set the pace for the future. That’s what Wotan thinks too.  “The sum of the intellect of the present,” as Wagner called him, is profoundly dissatisfied with the forced compromise that left the power of commodification securely in the hands of the aristocratic elite.  His goal in the second opera, The Valkyrie, is to go back on that compromise in some way indirect enough that he won’t be caught at it.

The problem, of course, is the same thing that undoes all his plans throughout the opera cycle: he’s ready, willing, and able to sacrifice anything and anybody for his goals except himself and his own interests. Self-aggrandizement is his overwhelming character flaw, and self-sacrifice—the one thing, as Wagner will argue, that can solve the problem posed by Alberich’s ring—is the one thing he can’t and won’t even conceive of doing. Wagner didn’t choose this detail of characterization at random. He recognized as clearly as anyone ever has that the craving for unearned power, and the collective egotism that drives it, are the besetting sins of the Western world’s intellectual class.

He was right, too.  From the days when Greek philosophers began to draw up the first sketch of the Western mind, the one thing you could count on was that whenever intellectuals made proposals about bettering society, most of them would argue that intellectuals like themselves should be first in line at the feed trough under the new arrangements. When Plato proposed in his Republic that philosophers ought to run the world, he was simply putting in the most blatant possible form the will to power that pervades Western intellectual life.

He was also following in the footsteps of the founder of the tradition of Western philosophy, Pythagoras, the guy who coined the word “philosopher” and who first proposed that what undergirded the material cosmos was not a substance but an abstract intellectual structure of laws and numbers, was also the first person we know of in the Western tradition to try to park intellectuals at the top of the political pyramid.  He succeeded for a while, too, by the simple expedient of getting all the leading political figures in the city-state of Crotona to become his students and embrace his ideas.

What happened in the slightly longer run makes a good object lesson to anyone who thinks the way Pythagoras did. Inevitably the ruling elite of Crotona applied the philosophy they’d been taught in ways that maximized their wealth and beggared everyone else, and insisted airily that since wisdom, justice, and truth were on their side, anyone who wanted to change things was simply an ignorant fool. The result was an uprising in which most of the students of Pythagoras were trapped inside the building where they met, and died when it was burnt to the ground. Pythagoras himself escaped, but died a short time later in the neighboring city of Metapontum, his dreams of a utopia of wisdom shattered.

You can see the same mistake the followers of Pythagoras made any time intellectuals set out to tell the rest of the world how they ought to live. Those of my readers who are familiar with the last few decades of self-proclaimed “deep thinking” can come up with plenty of examples.  Marx did the same thing in a slightly more veiled form, proposing a “dictatorship of the proletariat” that inevitably works out in practice to a dictatorship of a faction of intellectuals who rule in the name of the working class. By and large, the only Western intellectuals who refuse the temptation are those who don’t believe that it’s possible to design a better society from scratch, and of course they’re in the minority.

Wotan doesn’t belong to that minority. Au contraire, as the archetype of the Western intellectual, his goal as the orchestra begins playing the prelude to The Valkyrie is to get the Ring into his own grubby hands once again without violating any of the agreements that give him his power.  What’s more, he’s got a plan, and he’s been busy since the curtain came down on The Rhinegold getting all the pieces lined up.

In mythic language—well, let’s start by noting that if his wife Fricka wanted a divorce she’d have an easy time convincing the judge of her view of the case.  The first thing Wotan did to further his plan was to go looking for Erda the Earth Mother, who popped up in the last scene of The Rhinegold to convince him to let go of the Ring. He found her and, well, they got very friendly.  Nine bouncing baby warrior maidens resulted. They grow up into the Valkyries.

(And yes, if you’re suddenly thinking about Tolkien again, there’s a reason for that. In a very real sense, The Lord of the Rings is an edgy parody of The Nibelung’s Ring. Sauron, like Wotan, has only one eye, he’s chasing after a magic ring he had once and lost, and his head is full of plans and strategies and gimmicks. Oh, and he has nine servants who ride out on errands from his magic castle. Of course they’re not beautiful warrior maidens, they’re hideous undead wraiths, but then that’s part of the parody; where Wotan is a morally complex figure, at once the protagonist and the villain of his story, Sauron is pure unfiltered evil, an infinitely black backdrop Tolkien uses to silhouette the moral complexities of his protagonists.)

The Valkyries, as I was saying, then become Wotan’s human resources department.  Yes, humans have now entered the story.  In The Rhinegold, as my readers will doubtless recall, mere human beings were nowhere on the stage:  it was all gods, giants, nature spirits and Nibelung dwarfs. Now there are humans. Norse mythology has plenty to say about how they happened, but none of that enters into our story. It’s one more reminder that the gods, giants, et al. in Wagner’s operas fill the role that Feuerbach assigned them, as allegorical figures reflecting classes and ideas in the human world. From this point on, though, the story is going to slip down bit by bit from the heights of Valhalla to the gritty realities of human life.

(Here again, Tolkien follows the same arc, though he does it in The Silmarillion rather than his more famous trilogy.  That volume begins quite literally with a prologue in Heaven—the parallel with Goethe’s Faust is doubtless deliberate—and descends from there; in Tolkien’s own words, “If it has passed from the high and the beautiful to darkness and ruin, that was of old the fate of Arda Marred”—Arda, of course, being the world in which you and I live. Tolkien’s own highly traditional Catholic Christianity, with its doctrine that the Fall affected the world as well as the human species, is of course involved here, but it’s worth noting that Wagner, who was anything but Christian, traced out the same trajectory in his opera cycle.)

Wotan himself is an eager participant in that descent, and the second and third phases of his plan show that at work. The second phase, once he has the Valkyries safely installed in Valhalla, is to send them to harvest the bravest of slain warriors from battlefields to form a palace guard.  He know that it’s possible that the giant Fafner might decide to use the power of the Ring against the gods, and he also knows that Alberich is scheming night and day to get the Ring back.  His guard of warriors is there to stop them, even though he knows that the power of the Ring is such that this may not save him.

It’s the third phase of the plan that sets the plot of The Valkyrie in motion. Not satisfied with his dalliance with Erda, he also descends to the earth, adopts the pseudonym Wolf, and takes up with a human woman, fathering two children, Siegmund and Sieglinde. Things don’t go well for them; Wolf and Siegmund come back from hunting one day to find their home burnt to ashes, Siegmund’s mother slain by raiders and his sister gone. The two men live as outlaws for a while, and then Wolf vanishes too.

Sieglinde, it turns out, has been taken captive and sold to a chieftain named Hunding, who takes her as his wife. (Her wishes, of course, are not involved in this transaction.)  Hunding’s hall has, oddly enough, a great ash tree growing right up through the middle of it. At the wedding feast, a mysterious stranger shows up and thrusts a magic sword through the trunk of the ash tree, saying that it belonged to anyone who could draw it out. You know the rest of that story, dear reader, in its Celtic variant, where it’s the Sword in the Stone rather than a sword in a tree; nobody could make it budge until the rightful heir of the sword comes along. That heir, of course, is Siegmund.

In other words, Wotan arranged all these events for his own purposes, including the murder of his human wife and the abduction and marital rape of his human daughter. As I noted in our last installment, for all his pretensions of divine glory, he’s basically a sleazeball, and his sleaziness stands out in stark relief in The Valkyrie.  His goal is to toughen a mortal hero to the necessary degree of strength and fierceness, give him a magic sword, and then send him to kill Fafner, the giant who owns the Ring, who has used his stolen powers to turn himself into a gigantic dragon and now dwells in a cave, guarding his treasure. Since Wotan himself won’t be the one who kills Fafner, he thinks he has plausible deniability, and he can then get the Ring back and make his power secure forever.  Given Wotan’s treatment of his mortal wife and daughter, what might happen to Siegmund if he doesn’t fork over the Ring promptly enough doesn’t bear considering.

Wagner got all the raw materials of his situation straight from Norse mythology.  There, like so much of Norse myth, they had a cosmological dimension; the hall that has a mighty ash tree growing up through the center of it is of course the universe itself.  The two rivals in the story also have deep roots. As the son of Wolf, Siegmund is a Wulfing, and the name Hunding literally means “son of the Dog;” the dog and the wolf, the tame and the wild, form one of the great cosmological pairings of the Northern tradition. (Weirdly, they also show up extensively in later alchemical literature, and the possibility of a connection between Norse myth and the lore of alchemy deserves much more exploration than it’s received so far.)

That said, Wagner didn’t have cosmology (or, for that matter, alchemy) in mind when he penned the libretto for The Valkyrie. Let’s put everything through his Feuerbachian filter and see what it becomes. Wotan, as we have seen, is the intelligentsia of nineteenth-century Europe, trying to find some way to evade the ghastly consequences of capitalist commodification while still clinging to the influence and wealth it got from the capitalist system. What are the children of the intellect? On the plane of gods and giants, they are ideals; that’s what the Valkyrie are. On the human plane, they are people motivated by those ideals. Among them are Siegmund, the archetypal rebel who is motivated by the ideal of freedom, and Hunding, who represents the establishment of his day and is motivated by the ideal of law.

We’ll discuss the other characters a little later on; they all have their own Feuerbachian meanings. All through the first half of the nineteenth century, the two ideals of liberty and law came into conflict over and over again, and—just as in Wagner’s libretto—the intelligentsia of the time fueled the conflict and did their best to keep it ablaze, without the least concern for the cost in human lives and suffering. The French philosophes who destabilized the French monarchy and aristocracy that paid their bills are only one example of the phenomenon, and of course it’s just as widespread now as it was then—witness the university professors who denounce in strident terms the very system that provides them with their salaries and benefits.

Then as now, these denunciations are phrased in terms of abstract principles, but it’s not exactly difficult to see through the filmy garments of justification to the seething, sweaty craving for unearned power beneath. Wagner’s diagnosis of what we may as well call “Wotan syndrome” remains as cogent today as it has ever been. As we’ll see, his prognosis of the course of the syndrome is just as exact. Wotan’s plan—in essence, to encourage rebellion against the existing order of society, in the hope of snatching power from the hands of the rebels once they seize it—is fatally flawed from the beginning.  In our next installment, we’ll see what the flaw is and how it plays out in practice.