[Fasolt protests they only want their due, to which Donner retorts that his hammer is their due.]
Wotan: (stretching out his spear between the disputants: [[ #21 definitive: ]] Stop, you firebrand! Nothing by force (:#21)! (#27:) My spearshaft safeguards contracts (:#27): spare your hammer’s haft.
Freia: (#5?:) Sorrow! Sorrow (:#5?)! Wotan forsakes me!
Fricka: Have I heard you aright, (#37?:) merciless man (:#37?)?
The eternal optimist Froh’s arrival is heralded by his own, new motif in the orchestra, #31, which is closely related to the Motif of Freia’s Golden Apples of Sorrowless Youth Eternal, #29. Donner the Thunder God’s own motif #32ab expresses his nature as the god of storm and thunder, with two segments, a choppy descending segment followed by a segment representing rolling thunder, which will become a basis for the Storm Motif #60 with which the following music-drama The Valkyrie opens. #32b is actually based on the embryo for #21, the Spear Motif. Clearly, Donner is the fearful enforcer of the gods’ divine law and authority.
Wagner’s characterization of Donner in particular may owe something to Feuerbach, in that Feuerbach suggested that man’s fear of thunder (one particular example of that universal fear-in-general which he says gave birth to the gods) was God’s womb:
“Certain peoples … have no other word for God than thunder, so that their religion expresses nothing other than the shattering impression which nature’s thunder makes upon man through the ear, the organ of terror. (…) Considering that it was thunder which pounded religion into man, we may … term the eardrum the sounding board of the religious sense and the ear the womb of the gods.” [197F-LER: p. 27]
As Freia’s brothers thoughtlessly try to intervene in her behalf, without taking account of the Giants’ right by contract to her as payment for building Valhalla, Wotan wields the power of his spear to protect the Giants from Donner’s threatened hammer blow, crying out “(#21) Nothing by force! (#27) My spear guards contracts,” as we hear the Definitive Spear Motif #21. Wotan’s attempt to enforce the law by force, in order to pre-empt Donner’s use of force outside the law, bespeaks a contradiction at the root of the concept of law itself. Namely, that though law purports to crystallize in common practice man’s social conscience, in point of fact the only guarantor for law is the use of that very force which law ought to have rendered obsolete. Feuerbach captured the essence of this contradiction in his observation that the state is not based on religious belief, but on force. [See 325F]
Wagner concurs with this critique, noting the irony in man’s hope that through law violence can be restrained by the prudent use of violence:
