Die Walküre

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Fricka

As the protector of marriage, Fricka sees her divine laws violated by the adulterous and incestuous love between Siegmund and Sieglinde. What’s more, both had sprung from Wotan’s affair with a human woman – yet another humiliation of the worst kind for Fricka, who had already had to put up with her husband having fathered nine Valkyries with other women. Her cup is full and she demands satisfaction: Siegmund and Sieglinde must die. In a hard clash, she exposes the bankruptcy of Wotan’s project with irrefutable arguments and brings him to his knees.

Fricka’s mythological counterpart is Frigg, the wife of Odin (Wodan) and the goddess of marriage and motherhood. Our word for ‘Friday’ comes from her.

Wotan

A long time has passed since the gods entered Valhalla. Seeking answers, Wotan has visited Erda, the primordial goddess who lies in omniscient slumbers at the foot of the World Tree. The union of Wotan and Erda produced Brünnhilde, one of the nine Valkyries and Wotan’s favourite daughter. During his travels, Wotan also wandered among humans, and with one of the women he fathered Siegmund and his twin sister Sieglinde. He hopes to make Siegmund a free hero who, not bound by the treaties by which he himself is tied, will be able to defeat Fafner and take back the ring. In the guise of the ‘wolf man’ Wälse, he roams the earth in Siegmund’s company for years, before disappearing after leaving Siegmund a sword plunged deep into the trunk of an ash tree. Fricka denounces Wotan’s paradoxical desire to create a free hero while at the same time manipulating his destiny. Yielding to his wife’s merciless exhortations, Wotan resigns himself to ordering the death of his own child. When he is then also forced to give up Brünnhilde, all he longs for is the end …

Siegmund

Subject a young man to loneliness, suffering and danger for enough years and you will harden him into a hero capable of reclaiming the ring from the claws of the dragon Fafner. At least, that is Wotan’s hope for his mortal son Siegmund and the cruel destiny he has laid out for him. After his mother was killed and his sister kidnapped by a rival clan, Siegmund roamed the world with his father as a hunted lone wolf until his father disappeared.
One day, as a storm rages, Siegmund enters Hunding’s home, exhausted. He meets the lady of the house, Sieglinde, and for the first time he feels what means to be cared for, to be understood and ultimately to be loved. The next morning, however, a life-and-death duel with her husband awaits him …

Siegmund is modelled on one of the central heroes in the Völsunga saga, which relates the misadventures of the clan of the same name. ‘Sigmund’ appears there as the father of Sigurd (Siegfried); he is the only one who can draw the mythical sword from the ash tree that Odin (Wodan) plunged it into for him – two elements that Wagner also adopted in his Ring.

Sieglinde

The female half of the Wälsung twins, she has weathered as many trials as her brother. She was kidnapped by the clan that killed her mother and was then forced into a loveless marriage with a member of that clan, Hunding. One day, as a storm rages, an exhausted stranger enters her home with whom she immediately feels a deep connection. However, her husband recognizes in him his enemy and announces that they will have a life-or-death duel the next morning. Sieglinde slips a sleeping potion into Hunding’s drink so as to spend one last evening with the stranger. She feels instinctively that they are destined for each other as lovers, and the revelation that he is the brother she thought long lost only reinforces this feeling. When Siegmund dies, she loses any will to continue living, until she discovers that she is carrying his child …

The character of Sieglinde goes back to the mythological figure of Signy. She is, in the Völsunga saga, the wife of the false king Siggeir, who killed her father and all her brothers except her twin brother Sigmund. With him, she conceives a son, who will ultimately defeat Siggeir by burning down his hall. Once she has obtained her revenge, Signy chooses to follow her husband, whom she has never loved, into the flames.

Hunding

There are more sympathetic characters in the Ring than this tyrant from the lineage of the Neiding. Once, on a raiding trip with this race, he plundered the house of the Wälsungs, killed the mother and took the daughter, Sieglinde, to make her his wife against her will. On the morning of the events of Die Walküre, he has gone out with his ferocious hounds to hunt down a fugitive who is said to have killed some members of his race. Great are his surprise and suspicion when, after that futile hunt, he returns home to find a stranger who could be the enemy he was hunting and who physically resembles his wife. In accordance with the laws of hospitality, he offers Siegmund food and shelter for the night, but the next morning they will have to face each other in a duel. He wins this dual thanks to the intervention of Wotan, who then contemptuously kills him too. This allows Hunding to personally go and tell Fricka, his protector, that Wotan has accomplished her revenge.

The character of Hunding has several counterparts in the ancient sagas: he shares his name with King Hunding, Sigmund’s enemy in the Poetic Edda, but also shows traits of Siggeir, the treacherous husband of Sigmund’s twin sister Signy in the Völsunga saga. The Hundings (‘hound clan’) are known as the arch-enemies of the Wulfings (‘wolf clan’) in the earliest Germanic traditions already.

Erda

Erda is the primordial goddess of the earth. Asleep at the foot of the World Tree, this ‘Urwala’ possesses wisdom and a profound understanding of the universe: not only does she know the past, she can also predict the future. In Das Rheingold, Erda appeared to Wotan when he refused to give the ring to the giants. Intrigued by her warning, Wotan visits her after the gods have entered Valhalla. From their union Brünnhilde is born, one of the nine Valkyries.

Erda, whose name means ‘earth’ in Old High German, is associated with Jörd, the Norse goddess of the earth. Wagner drew his inspiration for this character from the Edda cycle and Jacob Grimm’s Deutsche Mythologie.

Brünnhilde

One of the nine Valkyries, Brünnhilde is the daughter of Wotan and Erda. She is initially tasked with protecting Siegmund in his duel with Hunding. But, after Fricka intervenes and demands to see Siegmund and Sieglinde punished for their adultery and incest, her father asks Brünnhilde to side with Hunding. Moved by the love between the two young people, however, Brünnhilde decides to disobey Wotan and to help them, convinced that this is her father’s true wish. When Wotan breaks Siegmund’s sword to ensure his defeat, Brünnhilde picks up the pieces of the sword before fleeing with Sieglinde …

Brynhild is one of the most famous Valkyries in Norse mythology and a central character in the Sigurd cycle. In Old Norse, her name literally means ‘Hildr of the breastplate’. The character was inspired by the Visigoth princess Brunhilda, the wife of the Merovingian king Sigebert I. She was famous for her bitter feud with Queen Fredegund. The latter’s son, Chlothar, ordered the queen to be tortured, tied by her hair as well as by an arm and a leg to the tail of a wild horse.

The Valkyries

The Valkyries – Brünnhilde, Gerhilde, Ortlinde, Waltraute, Schwertleite, Helmwige, Siegrune, Grimgerde and Roßweiße – are Wotan’s daughters. Riding winged mounts, these warriors are in charge of choosing the souls of the heroes who have fallen in combat and who deserve to be taken to Valhalla to defend the fortress. After disobeying Wotan by trying to save Siegmund, Brünnhilde seeks refuge among her sisters, who try in vain to defend her from their father’s wrath. But as the supreme god threatens to inflict the same fate on them as on Brünnhilde if they oppose his will, they flee. Important figures in Norse mythology, the Valkyries are mentioned in several seminal stories: the Poetic Edda, the Prose Edda, the Njáls saga and the Kings’ sagas. The Old Norse word valkyrja is composed of the noun valr (the slain on a battlefield) and the verb kjósa (to choose).