Siegmund: Threaten things stronger than Hunding’s blows! (#87 vari >>:) If you’re lurking here, lusting for slaughter, choose Hunding as your booty: I mean to slay him in battle (:#87 vari >>).
Bruennhilde: (shaking her head: #87) For you, Waelsung, (#89; #87) – mark me well – (#89:) for you the lot was cast (:#89).
Siegmund: (#57:) Do you know this sword? He who sent it decreed I should win: with it I’ll defy your threats (:#57)!
Bruennhilde: (with great emphasis: #57 hint?:) He who sent it has now decreed your death: its virtue he takes from the sword (:#57 hint?)!
Siegmund: (violently) Hush, or you’ll frighten my slumbering sister! (He bends tenderly over Sieglinde in an access of grief. (#40 inversion?:) Woe! Ah woe! O sweetest of wives! You saddest of all who are true (:#40 inversion?)! (#25/#40?:) Against you the world has taken up arms: and I, whom you trusted alone, and for whom you defied the world alone (:#25/#40), may I not shield you with my shelter but must I betray my brave sister in battle? Ha, shame upon him who sent me the sword if he now decrees not conquest but shame! (#24, #40/#25 heavy brass) (#47-like #24 vari which transforms into #25, #40 or #64?:) if I must fall, I’ll not go to Valhalla – hell shall hold me fast (:#47-like #24 vari which transitions into #25, #40 or #64?)! (He bends low over Sieglinde. #40 on heavy brass)
According to Wotan’s new Fricka-inspired dispensation, Siegmund was to have joined the other great martyrs of cultural history in death, thereby contributing to that grand tradition of heroic memory which sustains Valhalla and its ideals throughout history, the traditional pattern through which those reformers and revolutionaries who in life were regarded as threats by established society, become the pillars of that same society as it gradually transforms into something new after their death, when their life’s meaning becomes mythologized. But Siegmund, in his defiance of the fate assigned to him by Wotan and the gods of Valhalla, says he would seek out Hell (i.e., Alberichs’ Nibelheim) rather than Wotan’s Valhalla, if the price of embracing the heavenly life of Valhalla is renunciation of his earthly love for his sister Sieglinde. This harks back to Wotan’s potentially risky longing for a friendly foe who in challenging the gods will unwittingly save them from Alberich’s curse, since Wotan’s hero must be free of divine law and faith and belief in the gods, and is therefore also a potential threat to the gods like Alberich. But Siegmund’s threat to join Hell’s host also foreshadows Siegfried’s betrayal of Bruennhilde’s love under Alberich’s son Hagen’s influence: Siegfried, Siegmund’s and Sieglinde’s son, will effectively become a member
