and court, hall and keep, your blissful abode now stands there, solidly built (:#20a); (#20a modulation?:) the proud-standing walls (:#20a modulation?) (#20b?:) I tested myself; I looked to see if all was firm (:#20b?): (#20c?:) Fasolt and Fafner (:#20c?) (#20d?:) have done their work well (:#20d?); (#33b or #30b?:) no stone stirs in the studwork (:#33b or #30b). I’ve not been idle, like many here: he lies who calls me lazy!
All but one of the motifs which characterize the Fire God Loge in the Ring (the exception being #36) are introduced with his arrival. These are #33ab, which ascends and descends, #34, representing fire per se, and #35. #35 generates the two Tarnhelm Motifs #42 and #43, Bruennhilde’s Magic Fire Music #100, and ultimately Hagen’s Potion Motif #154. I noted previously that the Serpent (or Dragon) Motif #48 is also in this family. Furthermore, Dunning (and Cooke) suggests the first of Wotan’s Wanderer Motifs, #112, is also in this family. Since this entire set of Loge motifs is first heard as Wotan debates with Loge which of them is responsible for having made the bad bargain with the Giants, Loge’s motifs are permanently tainted with a shifty feeling, expressing Loge’s shifty relationship with the truth. He is, after all, the archetypal artist-hero who aids and abets the gods’ propensity for self-deception. But an important aspect of Loge’s character is that he must be familiar with the truth, as otherwise he wouldn’t be prompted to twist it.
Loge as both a fire god and trickster, or liar, has much in common with Christian notions of the devil or serpent in paradise, who lures Eve (who then lures Adam) with false promises that mortal man can partake of divine knowledge and immortality, without paying the price of death which God has threatened. The serpent lures mortal man into bringing about the irrevocable Fall, which exiles mortal man from paradise. Similarly, Loge lures Wotan into making the bargain with the Giants to build Valhalla, their heavenly abode, on the false promise that through Loge’s cunning he can redeem the gods from paying the price the Giants require, Freia, i.e., the price of having to renounce their claim to divinity. For it is through Loge’s cunning that the Giants are led to believe the gods’ debt to them has been satisfied, when it has not. In Wotan’s futile attempt to blame Loge for his own self-deception we find the Christian’s attempt to project his own need for self-deception, and the guilt this engenders, on to the serpent, or Satan. Loge then is our own artistic imagination, through which we deceive ourselves. It was this imagination which gave birth to the gods after Alberich forged the Ring of consciousness, and after man’s animal instincts, the Giants, were magnified to infinite, unassuageable fear and desire, by the Ring’s limitless power.
Loge’s self-description as one who is driven to hollow and height by his longing, for whom home and hearth hold no delight, aligns him with the natural necessity for change to which Wotan likewise pledged allegiance when he warned Fricka that though he would make the domestic tranquility of Valhalla his base of operations, he is driven nonetheless to step outside the bounds of Valhalla to conquer the exterior world, for, as he says, all who live love renewal and change. However, Loge glibly yet implausibly affirms that the gods’ new fortress is solidly built, knowing perfectly well that, thanks to the role his own cunning played in securing this fortress through false promises, its walls are brittle. But Loge remains an agent for creative change which ultimately is dangerous for religious faith and for tried and true custom and tradition, because anything new calls these eternal verities into question.
