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It will be seen that in this act we have lost all connection with the earlier drama. Brynhild is not only not the Brynhild of The Valkyries, she is the Hiordis of Ibsen, a majestically savage woman, in whom jealousy and revenge are intensified to heroic proportions. That is the inevitable theatrical treatment of the murderous heroine of the Saga.
The Largo is like running a little twenty-horse-power steam mill, and selling to the home grocers. But 'The Ride of the Valkyries, with those screaming discords of brass, and those magnificent crashes of harmony Jane, I've got an idea Wagner's work is the National Provisions Company set to music, and I'm the first trombone."
I was never tired of hearing her disdainful, petulant voice, those vibrations which sounded as if they proceeded from clear glass, and that music, which at times, became hoarse, harsh and fierce, like the loud, sonorous calls of the Valkyries. "Oh!
The children crowded upon the doorsteps, or sat down at the corners of the streets, crying as if their own mothers were dead. The Valkyries passed on. "Baldur is dead!" they said to the empty fields; and straightway the grass and the wild field-flowers shed tears. "Baldur is dead!" said the messenger maidens to the rocks and stones; and the very stones began to weep.
After this the Valkyries stepped from one stone to another until they reached a rock that stood alone in the middle of the sea; then, all together, they bent forward over the edge of it, stooped down and peeped over, that they might tell the monsters of the deep. "Baldur is dead!" they said, and the sea monsters and the fish wept.
Thus we have oska-steinn, wishing-stone, i.e. a stone which plays the part of a divining rod, and reveals secrets and hidden treasure; oska-byrr, a fair wind, a wind as fair as man's heart could wish it; osk-barn and oska-barn, a child after one's own heart, an adopted child, as when the younger Edda tells us that all those who die in battle are Odin's choice- bairns, his adopted children, those on whom he has set his heart, an expression which, in their turn, was taken by the Icelandic Christian writers to express the relation existing between God and the baptized; and, though last, not least, oska-maer, wish- maidens, another name for the Valkyries Odin's corse-choosers who picked out the dead for him on the field of battle, and waited on the heroes in Valhalla.
The long, grey legs went by him with a mighty stride. Gun-barrel and bayonet gleamed like moon on water. The battle-flag with the cross, the flag with the single star, spread red and blue wings. Past him they sped, gigantic, great ensigns of desperate valour, war goddesses, valkyries, ... rather the great South herself, the eleven States, Rio Grande to Chesapeake, Potomac to the Gulf!
Then he goes out as silently as he came, blind to the truth that no weapon from the armory of Godhead can serve the turn of the true Human Hero. Neither Hunding nor any of his guests can move the sword; and there it stays awaiting the destined hand. That is the history of the generations between The Rhine Gold and The Valkyries. The First Act
It was to have been one long experience of travel by day and night, by sea and land, and of adventure with strange and wild creatures Vikings, wolves, reindeers, Valkyries, giants, ice-mountains, and caves, fairies and fairies' homes.
I had, in fact, opened the poem of SIEGFRIED'S TOD with those scenes which now form the first act of the GOTTERDAMMERUNG. The details of Siegfried's relation to Brunhilda had been merely outlined to the listeners in a lyrico-episodical dialogue between the hero's wife, whom he had left behind in solitude, and a crowd of Valkyries passing before her rock.
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