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Updated: June 7, 2025
"You shall not have the gold! 'T is mine! Long years have I toiled and waited! The gold is mine, I say!" "Yours?" Alberich snarled in scorn. "Yours? You snatched it from the Rhine-daughters, did you? You paid the price to mould that ring?" And Mimi raved: "Who made the helmet, that wondrous cap that in a flash can change a man into anything he wants to be?"
"Ho! ho! my brother Alberich! We shall see who shall be master and who shall be slave!" Mimi found a cavern in a rocky cleft. It was just the kind of place he liked. In it was just the right kind of rock for a forge. There he hammered at weapons or chains or whatever happened to be his need.
Alberich haunted the immediate neighbourhood of the cave. Thus it happened that Sieglinde, directed by the Valkyries to that region, where she should be safest from Wotan's anger, was overheard by Mime, out in the lonesome wood, moaning in her trouble. He assisted her into his cave. There Siegfried was born, and there Sieglinde died.
Loge binds him fast, and the gods, with their struggling prey between them, hurry off through the pass by which they came. Then reoccurs, but reversed, the transformation between Nibelheim and the upper world. The region of the stithies is passed, the little hammers are heard. At last Wotan and Loge with Alberich reappear through the sulphur-cleft.
He rushed at Alberich and with his powerful hands he seized the gray-haired man by the beard. So roughly he pulled his beard, that he screamed aloud. The tugging of the youthful knight hurt Alberich sore. Loud cried the valiant dwarf: "Now spare my life. And might I be the vassal of any save one knight, to whom I swore an oath that I would own him as my lord, I'd serve you till my death."
He shall rule through the Ring who obtains it." This calm of Wotan's gives Alberich the idea that the god must, so to speak, have cards up his sleeve. "On the sons of heroes," he suggests ironically, "you place your insolent reliance, fond blossoms of your own blood. Good care have you taken of a young fellow not so? who cunningly shall pluck the fruit which you dare not yourself break off?"
But come on, thou brave dwarf!" Scarcely had he spoken, when he felt a shock which almost sent him reeling from his saddle, and made Greyfell plunge about with fright. Quickly, then, did Siegfried dismount, and, with every sense alert, he waited for the second onset of the unseen dwarf. It was plain that Alberich wished to strike him unawares, for many minutes passed in utter silence.
The watch over the gold is relinquished, and a little amusement sought in tantalizing and befooling the clumsy wooer. Alberich, later a figure touched with terror and followed with dislike, is likeable in this scene, almost gentle, one's sympathies come near being with him.
The water grows brighter with the rising of the sun, and the Rhinegold is seen to glow on the summit of a high rock. Defeated in his attempts to capture a nymph, Alberich scales the rock, seizes the gold and makes off with it.
The silly creatures have told him that their innocent toy, shaped into a ring, would confer upon its possessor power to rule the whole world, on condition that he surrendered love; and love being something Alberich is incapable of understanding, though he is amorous enough, he willingly pays the price for the sake of the power that is, the power costs him nothing.
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