We're sorry, but eCampus.com doesn't work properly without JavaScript.
Either your device does not support JavaScript or you do not have JavaScript enabled.
How to enable JavaScript in your browser.
Need help? Call 1-855-252-4222
The New copy of this book will include any supplemental materials advertised. Please check the title of the book to determine if it should include any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.
The Used, Rental and eBook copies of this book are not guaranteed to include any supplemental materials. Typically, only the book itself is included. This is true even if the title states it includes any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.
Chapter One
The Ring
A living myth is told and retold as the centuries pass. Poets, painters, musicians are nourished by its imagery, and in each retelling something is added from the collective attitudes, conscious and unconscious, of the time and from the individual vision of the artist. In the nineteenth century Richard Wagner was inspired by the legend of Siegfried and the ring to write his four great musical dramas: The Rhinegold, The Valkyrie, Siegfried , and The Twilight of the Gods , calling the whole cycle The Ring of the Nibelungen . The complete work was first performed in 1876. Some seventy to eighty years later, in our own times, another Ring cycle was published by a great artist, having its sources in the same myth of the ring of absolute power-- The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien.
It is of great interest to compare the likenesses and differences between these two eruptions of the ring symbol in the nineteenth century and in our own time. For example, in both stories the ring emerges from the unconscious into this world, promising absolute power to its possessor, bearing a curse which breeds violence, deceit, and corruption of heart and mind. "Care shall consume the ones who possess it and envy gnaw those who wish that they did. Each shall lust after its delights yet no one shall find any profit. Let death be his portion, fear be the bread he eats!" These words of Alberich's curse apply in every detail to the nature of the ring of Sauron: "One ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them." In both cycles the whole world is in jeopardy unless the ring can be returned to its source by a human being; and in both the redemption is followed by the death of the gods, or, in the symbolism of Tollden, by the departure from this world of the numinous, of elf and wizard.
The differences are equally fascinating. In the German myth Siegfried is entirely unconscious of the ring's meaning and of his task; even Brunhilde only breaks through to some awareness of what it is all about after Siegfried has been murdered. Frodo, on the contrary, takes up the burden of the ringbearer consciously, of his own free will, in full knowledge of the dangers and temptations involved in his quest. Brunhilde returns the ring to the water maidens; Frodo returns it to the fire. The fire in The Twilight of the Gods consumes hero and heroine, their horse, and the gods, as well as Hagen, son of Alberich. The fire of Mount Doom destroys the ring, Gollum, all the structures of the Dark Lord, and Frodo's ring finger; and the "gods" withdraw sadly but willingly from the earth when the time is ripe. To the meaning of these things we will return later after discussing The Ring of the Nibelungen cycle in some detail. Whereas Tolkien's story is well-known to most of us, Wagner's version of the myth is probably familiar only to the musicians among us. We shall therefore begin with a summary of the four librettos of his Ring operas.
The Story
The Rhinegold
The Rhinegoldopens with a scene in the depths of the river where the Rhine maidens guard the Rhinegold. Alberich, an ugly dwarf of the Nibelungen race emerges from a cave and watches the maidens at play, lusting after their beauty. They tease and mock him and he tries to catch one of them, his anger and desire growing stronger as they elude him. Then suddenly a golden light shines through the water, the gleaming of the Rhinegold, and Alberich, startled, questions the maidens, who tell him that if anyone could fashion a ring out of this gold he would be able to rule the world--nothing could stand against his power. That is why they guard it so carefully. They then reveal that only he who forswears all the joys of love can forge the ring from the gold, and say contemptuously to each other that for this reason they need have no fear of this dwarf who is panting with lust.
Alberich, however, is possessed immediately by a greed for power more than compensating for the loss of everything else and speaks to the nymphs: "Make love in the darkness, fishified race--hear this, O waves! I renounce love and curse it." And so he bears the gold from the rock and leaves the maidens crying "Woe!" in the darkness.
Meanwhile, Wotan is sitting on the mountaintop above the Rhine, gloating over the beauty of his new castle of Valhalla, which has been built for him by the giants. Fricka, his wife, reminds him of the terrible price which must be paid, for Wotan had thoughtlessly promised to give Freia to the giants in return for their work--Freia, the goddess of youth and of all growing things, she who grows the golden apples by which alone the gods are kept alive. Fricka chides Wotan for his hardhearted greed for power which had led him to make so wicked a promise. He reminds her that she, too, longed for the building of Valhalla so that she could keep him at home and check his wanderings.
Fasolt and Fafnir, the giants, come to claim their wages. Wotan calls desperately on Loki for help. Loki is the god of fire, the god of cunning tricks and dark riddles. He says that the only way to save Freia is to offer the giants something they would desire more than the love of woman, and then he tells of Alberich's theft of the gold and his forging of the ring of power. Both Wotan and the giants immediately begin to covet it, and the giants go off with Freia, saying they will hold her as hostage until Wotan can steal the ring from Alberich and give it to them as ransom.
We now see Alberich beating and tormenting his brother Mime, a master smith of the dwarves, all of whom Alberich has now enslaved to his will through the ring. Mime, following careful instructions from Alberich, has just made for him a helm, the Tarnhelm, which makes its wearer invisible and can transform him into any shape he wills. Wotan and Loki arrive to find Mime alone and cowering, and he tells them of the ring and of the helmet and of how Alberich has forced the dwarves to mine a huge hoard of treasure for him. Alberich arrives, the Tarnhelm hanging from his belt, and begins boasting to the gods of his wealth and of how he will eventually emerge from under the earth to the light of day, and all men and gods will fall under the spell of gold and will forswear all other loves, and the world will belong to him, Alberich, to do with as he wills. Playing on his vanity, Loki now tricks Alberich into showing the power of the Tarnhelm. Cunningly he lures him on until the dwarf turns himself into a toad, whereupon Loki and Wotan capture the toad, remove the Tarnhelm, and bind Alberich. They then demand his hoard and his ring in return for his life. Alberich desperately tries to keep the ring, but when it is torn from him he curses all who will carry it.
Fasolt and Fafnir come with Freia to exchange her for the gold, and Wotan, like Alberich, tries to hold back the ring. But the giants pile up the treasure round Freia until she is hidden save for one chink, which the ring will close. They refuse to release her until she is completely invisible to them--that is, until love is completely buried in gold. Wotan gives in, but only after Erda, the Earth Mother herself, has risen up to warn him of the fearful consequences of keeping it. The giants immediately start quarreling as to which of them will take the ring, and Fafnir kills Fasolt. This is the first death of the curse.
The gods now pass over the rainbow bridge to their glorious new castle of Valhalla, and the Rhine maidens are heard mourning for their gold. Wotan curses them for their harrowing noise.
The Valkyrie
The attempts of the upper and the lower powers to hold the ring have failed. The giant guards it in the form of a dragon, and only a human hero who knows no fear can contend with him. So we are now told the story of the events leading to the birth of this hero, Siegfried.
Sieglinda (Siegfried's mother-to-be) is married to Hunding, but one evening her unrecognized twin brother Siegmund comes to her dwelling and they fall deeply in love. Siegmund now finds the sword Nothung, which his father, Wotan, had left for him sticking in the ash tree which grows in Hunding's house. Only he can draw it out. He and Sieglinda flee together, Siegfried is conceived, and there is war between Siegmund and Hunding. Wotan, who had begotten Siegmund and Sieglinda on a mortal woman, loves his son and would befriend him, but Fricka, the outraged goddess of marriage, forces him to promise that Siegmund shall die and Hunding be victorious. Wotan had longed to create a free man but had failed.
So now, despite himself, he must kill his beloved son who had defied law--and the agent of this must be his own daughter Brunhilde. She is the chief of the Valkyrie, the warrior maidens, whose task is to bring dead heroes from the battlefield to live with the gods and protect them. Perceiving that Wotan's order is not his true desire, she plans to spare Siegmund and let him kill Hunding. Wotan, in fury at her disobedience, comes himself to the battle. Nothung is shattered against his spear and Siegmund dies. Brunhilde, however, overcome with pity, carries off Sieglinda to safety, and then must face the wrath of her father. She is condemned to sleep on a rock encircled by fire from which she can only be released by the kiss of a mortal man. She is somewhat comforted by the thought that only a hero without fear could penetrate the flames. Wotan now takes on the guise of the Wanderer and goes out into the world.
Siegfried
Sieglinda has found refuge in the cave of Mime, the dwarf smith, brother of Alberich, and she dies giving birth to Siegfried. The child is brought up by Mime in the hope that the boy, when grown, will kill the dragon Fafnir for him so that he can get his hands on the treasure and the ring. As Siegfried grows to manhood Mime forges sword after sword for him, but each one the boy breaks as soon as it is made, abusing his foster-father, whom he treats with extreme contempt and loathing, while Mime harps continually on all his seeming kindness to the boy. Finally Siegfried, having noticed that all birds and animals have mothers, forces Mime to tell him of his own mother, and out comes the story of his father's broken sword, the pieces of which Sieglinda had brought with her to the cave. Siegfried orders him to weld the sword together and storms out. There follows the arrival of Wotan, disguised as the Wanderer, who tells the dwarf that only Siegfried, the boy who knows no fear, can reforge the sword.
On Siegfried's return, Mime resolves to teach him fear and gain power over him that way. Siegfried is quite undismayed by the gruesome pictures Mime conjures up but is nevertheless most anxious to learn what that strange thing "fear" is. So when Mime tells him he can learn it from the dragon Fafnir, he is eager to be off and, seizing the pieces of the sword Nothung, reforges them himself and splits the anvil in half with the newly welded blade.
At the dragon's cave there is a confrontation between Wotan and Alberich, who spends his time watching there, hoping to regain the ring. The subhuman and the superhuman late possessors of the ring stand before the dragon's cave, but Wotan knows, as Alberich does not, that only the human hero can wrest the ring from the dragon now. He warns Alberich of Siegfried's approach with the plotting Mime.
Siegfried, waiting under a tree for the dragon to emerge, dreams of his father and mother and hears a forest bird singing. He wishes he could understand the language of the bird. Then Fafnir arrives, and Siegfried demands to be taught fear. They defy each other and Siegfried plunges Nothung into the dragon's heart, and as he draws it out his hand is splashed with blood, which burns like fire. Siegfried sucks his hand and so drinks a little of the dragon's poison, and his ears are opened so that he can now understand the language of the birds. The forest bird then tells him to take the ring and the Tarnhelm from the hoard and also not to trust Mime, who now appears with a drink for the tired warrior, which he has poisoned. Siegfried refuses to drink and kills Mime. Then he speaks to the bird of his loneliness and learns of Brunhilde, whom only a hero without fear can rescue from her living death within the flaming circle. Eagerly he sets off to find her, to learn fear from her.
On the way he meets the Wanderer, Wotan, who has just been telling the Earth Mother, Erda, that the rule of the gods will soon be over and that the world will be redeemed by a man who wins the ring. Nevertheless, as is his way, he now tries to prevent Siegfried from reaching Brunhilde, since it will mean the fall of the gods. Siegfried, shouting insults as usual, breaks Wotan's spear with Nothung and goes on his way. Then he walks through the fire and thinks at first, seeing her armor, that Brunhilde is a man. When he recognizes her as a woman, he kisses her and she awakes. He is ardently and passionately in love, but at first she rejects him in great fear, for to respond will mean loss of her divinity. Now it is his turn to realize that he may lose her, and so he knows fear at last. He continues to woo her and she finally yields, her own passion overwhelming her. They swear eternal love and pass the night in the cave, and in the morning Siegfried goes off to perform heroic deeds, giving Brunhilde the ring as pledge of his love.
The Twilight of the Gods
Brunhilde, left alone, is visited by one of her Valkyrie sisters who urges her to return the ring to the Rhine maidens as the only way of saving the gods and the world. Brunhilde refuses with a contemptuous laugh. Nothing in heaven or earth could make her part with Siegfried's gift.
Meanwhile, Siegfried comes to the Rhine and to a castle where he meets Gunther and his sister Gutrune and his half-brother Hagen, the son of Alberich. Hagen determines to get the ring from Siegfried, urged on by Alberich. He persuades Gunther and Gutrune to give the hero a magic potion, which makes him forget all about Brunhilde and fall in love immediately with Gutrune. Gunther has long had a dream of marrying Brunhilde but knows he has no hope of winning her, and Siegfried offers to go in Gunther's shape, through the power of the Tarnhelm, and win Brunhilde for him. So they set off and Siegfried, as Gunther, again penetrates the fire and claims Brunhilde, taking the ring from her as she calls on its power. Protesting in terrible grief, she is led to the castle by the Rhine where she finds Siegfried unfaithful and discovers his trick. In her rage she tells Hagen that she has made Siegfried invulnerable except in the back, thus sending Siegfried to his death.
Siegfried, having sworn blood brotherhood with Gunther, goes hunting with him and Hagen. Alone for a while beside the Rhine, he sees the Rhine maidens rise from the water and they beg him to return the ring, flattering him. He refuses. They disappear and he hesitates, thinking that he might give it freely--that he would like to possess one of them, if he were not true to Gutrune. Now they return and this time they threaten him, telling him of the ring's curse and how he will be killed if he doesn't part with it. This simply makes him start boasting again of how he isn't afraid of anything, and he refuses finally to give it up.
Hagen and the others arrive and question him about his reputed power to understand the speech of birds. He replies, "It is long since I heeded their chatter--since I heard women singing I have quite forgotten the birds." He tells the story of his life, and after a drink prepared by Hagen his memory is fully restored and he remembers Brunhilde and his love. Hagen then stabs him in the back. Singing of Brunhilde rising for the second time from sleep, he dies greeting her.
Siegfried's body is carried back to the castle--to Gutrune and Brunhilde. Hagen now tries to take the ring from Siegfried's finger, but the dead hand is raised and checks him. Brunhilde orders a great funeral pyre to be raised that she and his horse, Grane, may join him in the flames. She sings now of her love of the great hero, who, truest of all, was forced to betray her that she might finally learn wisdom; then she speaks to her father, sending home his ravens with the news "both feared and longed for"--the end of the gods.
Drawing the ring from Siegfried's finger, and calling on the Rhine maidens to claim it from the ashes, Brunhilde cries, "May the fire that burns me cleanse the ring from its curse! Dissolve it in the stream and ever keep safe the pure shining gold whose theft wrought such evil!" She throws a flaming brand into the pyre and speaks to Crane, her horse and Siegfried's, "My friend, do you know whither I lead you--are you neighing to follow your friend?" Joyfully she mounts and together they plunge into the fire. The Rhine rises, and on the flood come the Rhine maidens who hold up the ring, which Brunhilde has flung to them. In the heavens Valhalla and all the gods within it are consumed in the flames.
The Commentary
Wagner begins by making clear the origin and the nature of the ring of power. It is forged from the gold hidden in the depths of the unconscious, where there is no differentiation of good and evil. This gold, this treasure, lies in the womb of the great mother; her daughters, the Rhine maidens, collective anima figures of man's psyche, play and disport themselves around it, basking in the light of its beauty. They are its guardians, and from them it must be stolen if it is to reach the light of day, emerge into consciousness. In every age some individuals have dared consciously to descend and to take this gold, forging it into the circle of wholeness, of the Self, but for the most part it is stolen by the collective shadow of mankind, of which Alberich is the symbol. By him it is also forged into a symbol of the totality, but through his denial of Eros or love it becomes a small and exclusive ring, which may be used and possessed only by its owner. Just as the individual, singly not collectively, may come to wholeness only when he has found that to be finally alone is to include all, so one man alone can possess the ring of Alberich, identifying the totality with his personal will to power and excluding all that is other.
In The Lord of the Rings , as in the Nibelungen cycle, it is stressed that only one man at a time can wield the power of the ring. It is a symbolic statement of the truth that we cannot ever seek refuge from individual responsibility by blaming collective forces--that salvation and damnation alike are encountered by each man alone. The circle of wholeness and the ring of Alberich and Sauron are basically one and the same--the positive and negative poles of the Self. That which determines the nature of the power bestowed by the ring is the degree of consciousness with which each and every one of us responds to that love which is both "center and circumference." He who has reached the stage of "Love and do what you will" is completely free from any temptation whatsoever to use the ring whether for good or evil purpose, whereas he who rejects love and does what he wills is delivered over to possession by the ring, and so to ultimate destruction. For if The Rhinegold , indeed if the whole cycle makes anything clear, it is above all this--that the finding of the gold, the ring's forging, its passage from hand to hand, and the manner of the curse's operation on everyone who carries it or covets it are all determined by the individual's relationship to Eros, and to the meaning of love.
At the outset the gold is in the possession of the anima, of the unconscious, feminine principle in man. Alberich finds it when he is moved by lust of the lowest kind, but nevertheless the object of his lust is the beauty of the Rhine maidens. Through it he glimpses the beauty of the gold in the unconscious and through it he learns that the ring can only be forged at all by a man who has renounced love. This is true both of the ring of world domination and of the circle of wholeness, though in opposite senses. The seeker after the truth of love, just as the seeker after personal power, can only find the gold at all through the experience of his passionate, instinctive nature, and from this experience he learns that when his desire is purged of all possessiveness, all demand, he will be able to forge the ring of wholeness. For him this purging of Eros is the way to that love which is beyond desire, the love of which Jung is speaking when he says that only when a man can renounce any and every desire without a moment's hesitation has he found the Self. Nevertheless, only through desire can desire be transcended.
For Alberich, on the other hand, the renunciation of love means the total rejection of all the feminine values of relationship, of all tenderness and kindness, of all respect for the individual--a total exclusion of all but his own will. In Tolkien's story the ring has been forged long before the book opens, but Sauron is plainly the symbol of the complete denial of every kind of human relatedness. In his country there came a slow death to every growing thing. Eros being cast out, not even a plant could propagate.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Laughter at the Heart of Things by Helen M. Luke. Copyright © 2001 by Parabola Books. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
