unfit for a guest; into your hands I gave my head to enjoy the warmth of your hearth. By the rules of the wager I’ll take you as pawn if you cannot easily answer three questions: (#21) so, Mime, pluck up your courage!
Mime: (very timidly and hesitantly, but finally pulling himself together in frightened submission: #41; #117? [a furtive foreshadowing?]) (#41?:; [[ #117: ]]) It’s long since I quit my native land, long since I left my mother’s womb (:#41?; :#117); (#20a:) Wotan’s eye has lighted upon me (:#20a). (looking briefly and surreptitiously at the wanderer) (#20a?:) Into my cave he peered (:#20a?): my mother’s wit grows weak before it. (#41?:; #117>>:) But since I now need to be wise, Wanderer, ask away (:#117)! (#41; #101?) Perhaps, when forced, I may yet succeed (#17:; #71?:) in redeeming the head of the dwarf.
Mime is precisely wrong: he does not need to be wise, but rather, he needs to have a heart, in order to answer the questions Wotan now asks him, the very questions he should have asked Wotan, had Mime acknowledged his need for redemption. This is what Wotan means when he tells Mime that he failed to ask what he needed to know. Specifically, Wotan means that Mime needed to ask how Nothung could be re-forged, and who could do it. For Nothung, whose motif’s second segment, #57b, is the Primal Nature Arpeggio, is the means to redemption, the means to restore lost innocence, the life of feeling before the Fall caused by man’s acquisition of consciousness. As Wagner said, it was the loss of love (i.e., conscious man’s loss of the instinctive life of feeling of his preconscious animal ancestors), and ensuing lovelessness, that inspires historical man to seek restoration of that innocent realm of feeling which is freed from those contradictions of conceptual thought which beset man:
“I have succeeded in viewing natural and historical phenomena with love and with total impartiality as regards their true essence, and I have noticed nothing amiss except for – lovelessness. – But even this lovelessness I was able to explain as an aberration, an aberration which must inevitably lead us away from our state of natural unawareness towards a knowledge of the uniquely beautiful necessity of love; to acquire this knowledge by active striving is the task of world history … .” [597W-{4/13/53} Letter to Franz Liszt: SLRW, p. 284]
Mime is fallen beyond hope of this redemption: he lives too much in his head, which is why he will soon lose it. Mime, with unwitting irony insisting that he must now be wise, when in fact he can only save his head by renouncing its wisdom, expresses his hope that he will somehow answer Wotan’s questions and thereby save his head, as we hear Mime’s new motif #117. #117 has the quality of something subversive and privately conspiratorial about it, but Mime’s effort to redeem his head will fail in the face of Siegfried’s innocence. Mime says something else rather interesting: it is long since he left his native land, long since he left his mother’s womb. Wotan’s eye, he says, has peered upon him, and his mother-wit grows weak before it. Here he seems to acknowledge that his unwanted guest is Wotan himself, but he is actually saying something else as well. In S.3.2, when Wotan, as the Wanderer, confronts Siegfried before Siegfried plunges into Loge’s ring of fire
