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Updated: June 5, 2025
But on this scene depends the whole subsequent action. Mime tries to frighten Siegfried, and finds it impossible. He wants the Nibelung's ring to rule the world: Siegfried is the only man to get it; and after he has got it, Mime will avert the Wanderer's prophesied disaster by poisoning him. He tells the history of Sieglinda also, and Siegfried knows he is the hero.
Brünnhilda is overcome with admiration: this, at any rate, this love she can understand; she tells him to prepare to fight Hunding and she will help him. The next scene is unmatched, even in Wagner, for its terror and the swiftness with which the climax comes on. Clouds gather; Hunding's horn is heard and his voice; Siegmund leaves Sieglinda and goes off cheerfully and confidently to meet his foe.
He calls for his night-draught, sends Sieglinda into the sleeping-room, and follows her. She glances repeatedly from Siegmund to a spot on the ash-trunk; but he does not take her meaning. There follows a strange and beautiful scene.
As the goddess of covenants, laws, she wants vengeance wreaked on Siegmund and Sieglinda: they have broken the most sacred of all covenants in the eyes of a woman, the marriage covenant. Vainly Wotan pleads that the Valkyrie works unaided: she presses him, until at last he swears a sacred oath on his spear that Siegmund shall die.
Siegmund, his son, the hero, takes the sword, and then commits adultery and incest with Sieglinda, his sister, the wife of Hunding. Fricka, the punisher of matrimonial crimes, compels Wotan to let Hunding slay Siegmund. This is done, though Brunnhilde, the incarnation of love, tries to save the hero.
Siegmund lived, died, and his memory has almost perished; save to the dwarf, the very name of Sieglinda is unknown; other men have lived and died: nature only goes on her course, the trees each year bringing forth fresh leaves to repair last year's losses, as though the lives and deaths of brave men and women were nothing to her.
Slowly the red light fades; "Go, tell Fricka I have sent you," Wotan says bitterly, and at his nod Hunding falls dead; Brünnhilda has run round, picked up the shards of the Sword, and, gathering Sieglinda in her arms, rushed away.
Sieglinda has awakened to see this and collapses; Brunnhilda rapidly descends, and, gathering the fragments of the shattered sword, hurries Sieglinda off to seek shelter from Wotan's wrath. Wotan kills Hunding with a contemptuous gesture, telling him to say to Fricka that her will has been accomplished. He rests there for a moment, then goes off in flaming wrath.
Sieglinda tells how when she, full of grief, was wedded to Hunding, a grey old man, with one eye, clad in a blue cloak, came in uninvited, drove the sword Nothung into the ash-tree, and said that it should belong to the hero strong enough to draw it out. From all parts warriors came, but none could move it.
All Brunnhilda's plaint is magnificent in its sweetness and pathos; and the sleep-music, with its caressing, lulling figure, is a thing by which a man's memory might well live for ever. This, the tragedy of Siegmund and Sieglinda and the punishment of Brunnhilda, is the first of the subsidiary dramas; the second, the finding of Brunnhilda by Siegfried, must now be considered.
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