Your responsibility is as legion, god, as your daughters Who bring warriors as carrion to your stronghold
Your integrity crumpled as you joined Far lesser creatures in their lust for loveless power
Nevertheless, you know who’s in control Who weaves the rope of fate
And that the future is not in your hands No matter how privy you thought you were to divine insight
Perhaps you can see only half of what comes your way?
Woe that you should cultivate your doppelgänger!
For he will displace you
And overturning your rule, your role, your plea for all you have done He will in turn fall under the sway of inconsequential weaklings
But by then you will no longer care
Sieglinde steadfast
Without surrender
to whispering neighbors who shrouded her in domesticity to the jealous gods who decreed the marriage contract to her own family suspicious of her origin; fearful of her power
Sieglinde, rooted in the promise of victory
Like the ash tree rooted in the squalid hut she shared with a dullard spouse Mischance is her choice The triumph of agony The sword planted in the tree She will plant a life and give up her own For the bare hope alone of uplifting a new age
Mime’s prowess
Such wisdom, gone greedwise to waste—
The world’s master artisan who could forge mute metal into fantasies fulfilled and recite many thousand years of history like the eyewitness he was
So why did his craftiness do him no good?
It must have entered his forfeit head that he would never recover the Ring—
that all those strivings would only skewer him
But his humiliation was too great The misjustices sent against him strangled his voice
And thus he preceded on paths chosen by others an unrequited agent for a more vastly unfurling destiny
Gutrune’s kindness
With intuition long nurtured in obscurity she took him in from the start
Knew how unschooled Siegfried was for a deceitful world [could not steer unguided by a feminine touch] [would be chewed by viperous plotting teeth]
Her interest in the Ring — mousy heiress to a minor waterfront property — was curiosity only her aspirations were domestic simply for her husband to sing a path through the forest and bring home deer at night
She did not even recognize the existence of power until it mauled her with merciless intensity