At the beginning of Wagner’s Die Walküre (The Valkyrie), the second installment in the Ring cycle, Siegmund, a tormented hero fleeing the promise of his own death, rushes into a home perched within a mighty ash tree. A storm throttles the forest beyond, and the house appears inviting, or at the very least warm enough to shelter him. Inside, he will later learn, a sword stands, plunged into the layers of bark, waiting, as it has for longer than he can even comprehend, for his hand. The placement of this sword, an embodiment of his fate, within a domestic environment is no accident: Wagner juxtaposes the cosmic and the personal throughout his music dramas, but particularly with regard to the question of wisdom. While the gods, giants, and dwarves have their own understanding of the end of the world, which shapes their conception of wisdom, the inclusion of humans, already mortal and destined for far shorter lifespans than any of the theoretically divine in the Norse tradition, immediately places small-scale doom in a far closer range, transforming its portrayal as a narrative force. The inevitability of human death prompts the convergence of gnomic and cosmic wisdom: cosmic wisdom, pertaining to the world itself (in this case, knowledge of Ragnarok), becomes one and the same with gnomic wisdom, pertaining to individual life (in this case, understanding of one’s own death as the result of external events). Ultimately, the inclusion of human narratives in the Ring cycle results in the domestication of doom, or the application of apocalyptic thinking to personal fate.
Wagner refines the Norse storytelling convention of the wisdom contest by altering the rules of the game such that the player who can most effectively unite gnomic and cosmic wisdom ultimately leaves victorious. Eddic wisdom contests, a hallmark of the Norse tradition, typically revolve around a faceoff between gnomic and cosmic wisdom, where an excess of worldly knowledge often results in a deficiency in common sense, spelling doom for the contestant. In the Alvíssmál, Thor, never particularly revered for his knowledge, manages to easily beat Alvis (literally translated as all-wise), who seeks his daughter’s hand. While Alvis has retained a staggering array of knowledge of the cosmos—indeed, Thor insists that he has “never met another man so learned in ancient lore” and that Alvis must “know all that has ever happened”—he has forgotten the one crucial piece of information that Thor remembers: his dwarfish allergy to the sun, which will kill him instantly. Alvis’s death as a result of “too much talk,” as Thor describes it, and too little observation illuminates the victory of gnomic wisdom over cosmic wisdom, which emphasizes the importance of practicality as opposed to knowledge for the sake of knowledge. As glimmers of light begin to peek through the windows of the hall, gnomic wisdom triumphs.
Meanwhile, in Wagner’s world, the wisdom-contest between the Wanderer (Wotan) and Mime detailed in Siegfried relies on an entirely different set of standards. By asking questions he is curious about the answers to and treating the game rather more like a normal conversation, Mime displays that he in fact does not know the traditional wisdom-contest form, nor is he aware of the information the loser of a wisdom contest might often be expected to know. While he claims to be “no expert in heroes’ histories,” he delivers an impressive amount of cosmic wisdom for a man who has spent years raising an ungrateful warrior child, yet what he fails to do is understand the practicality with which one must approach the game (Wagner 174). The Wanderer’s victory rests on his ability to both answer the questions posed to him and use common sense to manipulate his own question-asking to obtain the information he needs and think strategically. Consequently, the definition of wisdom, or at least the version of wisdom that yields superior results when put to the test, has shifted, illustrating the convergence of the two conventional types of wisdom into one that highlights the merging of individual and collective fate. Every wisdom contest has high stakes, but this one in particular could (and does) kick off the end of the world.
Wisdom takes an entirely different form in Wagner’s work: as opposed to too much cosmic wisdom resulting in death, danger appears to arise primarily from ignorance and selfishness, or difficulty in weighing one’s personal interests against their wide-ranging consequences. Where in Snorri’s Edda, Kvasir, a being known for his wisdom, dies as the result of a rash decision to dine with dwarves, who defend themselves by claiming that Kvasir “suffocated in intelligence” as a result of his intellectual superiority, Wagner’s characters bring about their own doom through their inability to reconcile their sense of right and wrong in their personal lives with their understanding of the rest of the world. Hagen displays cunning in urging Gutrune to “remember the... magical drink” and pursue Siegfried by any means necessary, but no character in the scene knows enough to evaluate the consequences of their actions, nor to conclude that whatever choice they make regarding a great hero and Wälsung could effectively produce the end of the world. The implications of their decisions are such that without understanding the cosmos, no conventional advice on the utility of trickery or the nature of love will bear the desired fruit.
Where the humans and the gods mix, so too must their understanding of the world, as every decision becomes an individually consequential one. While Gunther exhibits traditional hosting etiquette by inviting Siegfried to “share in [Gunther’s] birthright,” feigning xenia, as the Greeks would call it, until he resorts to trickery in order to secure his desired marriage outcomes for his family, he does so without any understanding of the implications of his actions. The Wagnerian apocalypse results from the mortals’ (and, separately, Wotan’s) difficulty in understanding where and how gnomic wisdom alone simply will not suffice; doom, in its domestication, has arrived at their doorstep, and yet their manuals of etiquette instruct them to welcome in a stranger and assume the Grim Reaper mask is a regional peculiarity. (In this case, Wotan falls into a different trap: he neglects the reality of how one must live and how humans live to pursue an ill-thought-out plan to save the universe, and his last-ditch efforts to postpone Ragnarok serve to hasten it instead.) Cosmic and gnomic wisdom, in a universe where the individual decisions of humans could very easily usher in Ragnarok, become one and the same, as knowledge of how to live well coincides with knowledge of how the world is and will be.
The Wagnerian “good life,” by contrast to the version posited in the original Norse tradition, is one of adherence to the will of the gods, marked by knowledge of the history of the cosmos: the Wälsungs must do their father’s bidding and execute his ill-thought-out plan to save the world. The Hávamál, the most comprehensive source of gnomic wisdom in the present-day historical record, emphasizes adherence to convention but also the importance of personal agency where it might otherwise be deficient. The poem counsels that “a mind full of sense” is the best thing a man can possess, that the ideal friend is one’s own mind, and that social niceties rely on independence. As opposed to the advice dispensed by the Hávamál—relentlessly practical, mostly ignorant of matters beyond the self, and firmly based on the assumption that others are tricksters, and so the reader too should take part in the trickery—Siegmund and Sieglinde live doomed to incest, destined to take part in a narrative far beyond their own existence and dropped directly into a story that ends only in death. In such a situation, common sense has reached a frontier at which it ceases to be applicable, where the Wälsung twins have been “enticed to love” through no fault of their own, cast in roles that require they become the stuff of myth, cosmic wisdom in the making. Every human who appears in the Ring acts as a pawn for Wotan’s chess game against the end of the world, caught in the thrall of incomprehensibly immense power being wielded as would most suit individual interests; in such a situation, no traditional paradigm of wisdom applies, and every personal decision carries apocalyptic connotations.
Doom, and therefore predestination, have seeped into even the most intimate of matters: Siegmund and Sieglinde’s seemingly pure love sets off the chain of causation that leads most directly to the burning of the world and the creation of a new one, while the brisk march to Ragnarok is only hastened by Gutrune, Hagen, and Gunther’s selfish and excessively individualistic decisions. Siegmund believes his and Sieglinde’s blood to be “blessed” as the result of what he appears to view as the divine coincidence of the sword’s presence in the same home as his sister, now bride. Such a word betrays his understanding of the pivotal role that preordained fate has played in the story of his life and his knowledge that his decisions are not his own. As he has been stripped of any and all agency, his practical choices are inextricably bound up in who and what he is. As a result, his inevitable death is both a harbinger of large-scale doom (Ragnarok) and a mark of his smaller-scale doom. Just as the sword he will one day bear has been wedged into the cracks of his rightful family home, so too has the future of the cosmos invaded his personal life and eradicating the boundary between the internal and the external.
The domestication of doom renders the entire world immediate and personal, the cosmic future contingent upon the self. As the end of this cosmos approaches for Wagner’s characters, their understanding of wisdom necessarily collapses onto itself, forcing every individual decision to carry far more weight than it ever should as doom becomes an ever more pervasive driving force in their lives. Following the burning of Siegfried’s pyre and the destruction of the world Wotan so carefully crafted, the castle that started off the whole cycle in the first place, however, the inhabitants of the new world will have the chance to define for themselves what it means to be wise, what it means to be good, and what it means to have a destiny beyond the self. In some visions of the future, the cycle will remain endless: the gods, whoever they may be, will convert some into players in the game of doom, dancing along until they bring about Ragnarok, over and over again. In others, though, a better world is possible, one that improves upon the past and may not end with doom permeating the bounds of the family and forcing personal, individual decisions to take on tragically outsized significance. In this better world, although the Ring primes the world to begin again in its final bars, the sword will never be plunged into the tree. Twins will not be destined to circle around one another, separated and reunited and doomed to long for one another as the result of forces beyond their control. Wisdom, in this case, does not require such harsh divisions between the practical and the cerebral, nor does it require their collapse. Death will remain, of course, but it need not spell the end of the world as its inhabitants know it. Instead, every doom, no matter how small or how easily confined to one home or one family, conceals within it a new beginning.