The Valkyries

Edward Benson

Richard Wagner

Edward Frederic Benson

The Valkyries

PREFACE

In the following pages an attempt has been made to render as closely as possible into English narrative prose the libretto of Wagner's "Valkyrie". The story is one little known to English readers, and even those who are familiar with the gigantic music may find in the story something which, even when rendered into homely prose, will reveal to them some new greatness of the master-mind of its author. It is in this hope that I have attempted this version.

Whether I have attempted a task either absolutely impossible, or impossible to my capacity, I cannot tell, for so huge is the scale of the original, so big with passion, so set in the riot of storm-clouds and elemental forces, that perhaps it can only be conveyed to the mind as Wagner conveyed it, through such sonorous musical interpretations as he alone was capable of giving to it. Yet even because the theme is so great, rather than in spite of it, any interpretation, even that of halting prose, may be unable to miss certain of the force of the original.

The drama itself comes second in the tetralogy of the Ring, being preceded by the Rheingold. But this latter is more properly to be considered as the overture to a trilogy than as the first drama of a tetralogy. In it the stage is set, and Heaven above, rainbow-girt Walhalla, and the dark stir of the forces beneath the earth, Alberich and the Niebelungs, enter the arena waiting for the puny and momentous sons of men to assert their rightful lordship over the earth, at the arising of whom the gods grow grey and the everlasting foundations of Walhalla crumble. From the strange loves of Siegmund and Sieglinde, love not of mortal passion, but of primeval and elemental need, the drama starts; this is the first casting of the shuttle across the woof of destiny. From that point, through the present drama, through Siegfried, through the dusk of the gods the eternal grinding of the mills continues. Once set going the gods themselves are powerless to stop them, for the stream that turns them is stronger than the thunderings of Wotan, for the stream is "That which shall be."

In storm the drama begins, in storm of thunder and all the range of passion and of death it works its inevitable way, till for a moment there is calm, when on the mountain-top Brunnhilde sleeps, waiting for the coming of him whose she is, for the awakening to the joy of human life. And there till Siegfried leaps the barrier of flame we leave her.

В В В В E. F. BENSON.

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION THE HOUSE OF HUNDING

Never before in the memory of man had spring been so late in coming, and into mid-May had lasted the hurricanes and tempests of winter. Not even yet was the armoury of its storms and squalls wholly spent, and men, as they huddled by the fire and heard night by night, and day by day the bugling of the wind, and the hiss of rain and the patter of the hailstones, wondered what this subversion and stay of the wholesome seasons should portend. For now for many years had strange omens and forebodings shadowed and oppressed the earth. Some said that the earth itself and Erda the spirit of earth were growing old; some even had seen the great mother, not as of old she had appeared from time to time, vigorous and young, clad in the fresh green of growing things, but old and heavy-eyed, and her mantle was frosted over with rime, for the chill of the unremitting years had fallen on her. Others again said that in Walhalla, which Wotan the father of gods and men had builded by the might of giants, all was not well; that shadows crowded in places where no shadows should be, and that their companies grew ever greater, and that dim voices of wailing and of warning sounded in the ears and in the high places of the gods. Others said that the gods themselves were growing old; that Wotan feared the spirits of the earth, and of the places beneath the earth, for he was no longer certain of his strength, and that age and the gr