accompanied by #45ab, that the Nibelungs are now Siegfried’s slaves. It is clear to anyone who knows the Ring libretto intimately that there is not one moment in the work in which Siegfried is shown wielding any power over Alberich’s fellow Nibelung dwarfs. The only Nibelung dwarf Siegfried ever knew was Mime, his foster-father, and Siegfried killed him. Granting that Mime complained to Siegfried that he was slaving day and night to produce a good sword that Siegfried could wield, Mime was doing this of his own choice in order that Siegfried could kill Fafner for him and win Fafner’s Ring for him.
The solution is the following: just as the Nibelung dwarf Alberich (Dark-Alberich) and Wotan (Light-Alberich) are essentially the same person, both representing aspects of collective, historical man’s nature, so the Nibelung dwarfs actually represent us, the human species, as understood objectively. Objectively, so the thesis goes, we are moral and physical dwarfs in the face of the invincible egoistic impulses (the Giants Fafner and Fasolt) which motivate all we do, and in face of Alberich’s hoard of knowledge of our true, craven nature. In R.3 Loge told Mime that Wotan and Loge would liberate the Nibelungs from the slavery their fellow Nibelung Alberich had imposed upon them. What this meant, metaphorically, is that both religion and secular art liberate man from the misery of objective, loathsome self-knowledge, granting man at least the feeling that he can transcend his physical limitations and egoistic impulses, that man, in other words, has a spark of divinity. When Hagen says that the Nibelungs are Siegfried’s slaves, what he means is that man’s religious impulse, first represented by the God Wotan, and later represented by the secular artist Siegfried, has taken possession of collective man’s imagination and mind, so that Alberich and Hagen cannot yet dominate man. Wotan proved this to Alberich when he offered him the option to wake Fafner – religious faith’s fear of the truth – to see if he could persuade him to give up the illusions which allow man to sleep and dream, rather than wake, and Fafner answered that he has and he holds (i.e., is secure within the thought-world provided by the gods), and said he would return to the comfort of his sleep. And right after Siegfried arrives, though Gunther hopes to exploit Siegfried’s heroism for his own purposes, Gunther will effectively offer him the keys to his kingdom, leaving Hagen out.
An interesting point on this score: the answer to Gunther’s question whether Siegfried won the Ring from Fafner in fair fight, is that Siegfried did not. Siegfried, as the incarnation of Wotan’s (collective man’s) Loge-inspired need to deceive himself about the truth and replace it with a consoling illusion, has employed unwitting cunning and trickery to win the Ring from Alberich and keep it out of his hands. Hagen notes that the ring of fire which protects Bruennhilde from intruders will only yield to Siegfried. That is, the veil of Wahn behind which man’s religious faith and art hides the bitter truth, will yield only to the authentically inspired artist-hero, who can safely draw inspiration from the fateful truth, because he confronts it subliminally, within his unconscious, rather than consciously, and forgets it once he wakes, reborn, to create a new work of art. Hagen can potentially exploit Siegfried the music-dramatist’s unique access to the inner processes of unconscious religious revelation and artistic inspiration, so that Siegfried will unwittingly betray the unspoken secret of which he is the involuntary and oblivious guardian.
What Hagen has to do then, in order to discredit man’s religious impulse as found in the love of Siegfried and Bruennhilde (inspired art), and supplant it with the scientific world-view, is to find a weakness in the love which Siegfried and Bruennhilde share, an Achilles Heel in the inspired art to which their loving union gives birth. And Hagen hopes to accomplish this by manipulating
