This last is of crucial importance. As Deryck Cooke pointed out in the introduction to his lamentably unfinished study of the Ring (see the mini-bibliography at the end of this post), while many other aspects of the work underwent development and transformation in the course of its creation, Wagner’s original conception of Siegfried himself remained essentially unchanged. That was of a new kind of man who, free of the pollutions, corruptions, and hypocrisies of both state and church—free, in best mythical-hero tradition, even of parental nurture and instruction—might found a race at one with Nature and with instinctual human love. That, of course, would require union with a woman also released from all prior obligations, yet herself possessing traces of the godly DNA (or, in language more appropriate to Wagner’s time, “with godly blood in her veins”). Wagner envisioned this as an only remaining hope, having concluded that humankind as it exists is incapable of extricating itself from its political and religious constructions, its drive for wealth and power, its alienation from its own true nature. The Siegfried we meet in Act 1 is not conscious of his heroic role, and as yet has no basis for making moral distinctions or forming a code of conduct. He’s a high-testosterone adolescent, home-schooled by a designing dwarf, a metalsmith, who came by his charge by chance, but who knows enough of the relevant history (and is a participant in it) to be aware of this youth’s possible use to him. Siegfried’s unspoiled instincts render him allergic to this foster father and mistrustful of his claims to paternity. Yet, after every excursion into the surrounding forest, where his observations of the natural life with which he feels such kinship teach him more of the truth than the dwarf will tell, an impulse he does not understand leads him back to the cave and the smithy. He still needs a piece of knowledge that has so far eluded him, and without which he cannot move on—the knowledge of where he really comes from, and, thus, who he really is.

Besides his strength and intuition, the unmatured Siegfried has one further—and supreme—attribute: he knows no fear. This is very much in the category of something he doesn’t know he doesn’t know, and is the thing that will enable him to use his strength and intuition to overcome every force that resists the emergence of the new, unbeholden human, including  that of the gods themselves. It is only this unbeholden human who can at last lay claim to being the individual in full who can act freely on behalf of humankind, and, with his similarly unbeholden mate, generate a new and better order of being. One can call such a person a hero or even a superman. If so, what the Ring eventually shows us is that just as the reign of the gods must end, so must that of the heroes. It will be up to us ordinary folk, standing on the riverbank amid flood and fire, who will have to somehow make the world work. Meanwhile, Wagner, having brought us under the spell of the full force and mystery of the godly powers and the dark forces of Nature, now brings us the transcendent hope of heroic strength and fearlessness, of the dispelling of mystery, in league with all the benign, bright, lifegiving aspects of nature and, in the final scene, of natural, sexual love. And this is personified for us in this reckless youth, as indifferent to the struggles and maneuverings of others as is Nature herself, and acting very much on the supposition that his instinctive feeling is, in itself, “the moral.”