# The Ring of the Nibelung and Lord of the Rings



## Bellerophon (May 15, 2020)

Is anyone here a fan of both Wagner and Tolkien. Does anyone have any thoughts on the contrast between the way in which the two writers used and interpreted Norse Myth?


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## Seattleoperafan (Mar 24, 2013)

Because of stagecraft Wagner avoided most supernatural situations whereas Tolkien was full of magic. With Wagner the music was the magic. Also in Wagner people were related often to each other even in couples, but sex and family were largely missing from Tolkien. The exceptions were the Elf King and Queen and the Lord of Rohain. In Wagner the Rhinemadens and the dragon were the only non human creatures.... nothing as exotic as a Balrog or Treebeard of Tom Bombadil. The primary supernatural event in The Ring was the destruction of Valhalla. Also in Wagner there is no Evil with a capital E like there is in Sauron and the Dark Riders.


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## Becca (Feb 5, 2015)

^^^ Hmm...

- Magic, what about the Tarnhelm?
- Or the potion in Gotterdammerung
- Or the dragon's blood
- I wouldn't exactly describe Loge as human, and the dragon is actually Fafner


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## MAS (Apr 15, 2015)

I loved the movies if *The Lord of the Rings* and the operas of *Der Ring des Nibelungen*, other than that, I never really thought to compare them, they seem so different. If based on Norse myths, they chose different ones on which to base their works.


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## Seattleoperafan (Mar 24, 2013)

Becca said:


> ^^^ Hmm...
> 
> - Magic, what about the Tarnhelm?
> - Or the potion in Gotterdammerung
> ...


You have a point but none of those require any stagecraft or if filmed any CGI. None would you say "Whoa!" like the shadowy world of the Black Riders seen when the ring is worn or the giant squid at the entrance to the mines or the torrent off water with horses in it that scatter the Black Riders. They impart more states of mind I think which take place subjectively rather than visually. I am willing to be wrong.


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## marlow (11 mo ago)

Tolkien refused to admit that his ring had anything to do with Wagner's. "Both rings were round, and there the resemblance ceased," he said. But he certainly knew his Wagner, and made an informal study of "Die Walküre" not long before writing the novels.

Interesting article here

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/12/22/the-ring-and-the-rings


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## Forster (Apr 22, 2021)

marlow said:


> But he certainly knew his Wagner, and made an informal study of "Die Walküre" not long before writing the novels.
> 
> Interesting article here
> 
> https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/12/22/the-ring-and-the-rings


More significantly, he knew his Anglo-Saxon languages and related mythology. The broad parallels seem obvious to me, but Tolkien was an English writer, Wagner a German composer: they were never going to create the same 'new' myths.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

marlow said:


> Tolkien refused to admit that his ring had anything to do with Wagner's. "Both rings were round, and there the resemblance ceased," he said. But he certainly knew his Wagner, and made an informal study of "Die Walküre" not long before writing the novels.
> 
> Interesting article here
> 
> https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/12/22/the-ring-and-the-rings


Alex Ross has written a good piece there. I'd select the following from it as germane to this thread:

_'For Tolkien, myth is a window on an ideal world, both brighter and blacker than our own. For Wagner, it is a magnifying mirror for the average, desperate modern soul.

'There is a widespread conception of Wagner's cycle as a bombastic nationalistic saga in which blond-haired heroes triumph over dwarfish, vaguely Jewish enemies. Wagner unquestionably left himself open to this interpretation, but the "Ring" is not at all what it seems. It is in fact a prolonged assault on the very idea of worldly power, the cult of the monumental-everything that we think of as "Wagnerian." At the beginning, the god Wotan is looking to expand his realm. But every step he takes to assert himself over the affairs of others, to make his will reality, leads inexorably to his downfall. He is marked from the outset, and the ring becomes a symbol of the corruption of his authority. Tolkien believes in the forces of good, in might for right. Wagner dismisses all that-he had an anarchist streak early on-and sees redemption only in love.

'When Tolkien stole Wagner's ring, he discarded its most significant property-that it can be forged only by one who has forsworn love. (Presumably, Sauron gave up carnal pleasures when he became an all-seeing eye at the top of a tower, but it's hard to say for certain. Maybe he gets a kick out of the all-seeing bit.) The sexual opacity of Tolkien's saga has often been noted, and the films faithfully replicate it. Desirable people appear onscreen, and one is given to understand that at some point they have had or will have had relations, but their entanglements are incidental to the plot. It is the little ring that brings out the lust in men and in hobbits. And what, honestly, do people want in it? Are they envious of Sauron's bling-bling life style up on top of Barad-dûr? Tolkien mutes the romance of medieval stories and puts us out in self-abnegating, Anglican-modernist, T. S. Eliot territory. The ring is a never-ending nightmare to which people are drawn for no obvious reason. It generates lust and yet gives no satisfaction.

Wagner, by contrast, uses the ring to shine a light on various intense, confused, all-too-human relationships. Alberich forges the ring only after the Rhine maidens turn away his advances. Wotan becomes obsessed with it as a consequence of his loveless marriage; he buries himself in his work. Even after he sees through his delusions, and achieves a quasi-Buddhist acceptance of his powerlessness, he has nothing else to lean on, not even his Gandalfian staff, and wanders off into the night. Siegfried and Brünnhilde, lost in their love for each other, succeed in remaking the ring as an ordinary trinket, a symbol of their devotion. They assert their earthbound passion against Wotan's godly world, and thus bring it down. *The apparatus of myth itself-the belief in higher and lower powers, hierarchies, orders-crumbles with the walls of Valhalla. Perhaps what angered Tolkien most was that Wagner wrote a sixteen-hour mythic opera and then, at the end, blew up the foundations of myth.*'_

That last bit which I've put in bold is fundamental. In Wagner, it isn't merely the gods that die, but the very idea of gods. Wagner was a secular humanist, _Parsifal_'s apparent religiosity notwithstanding (and that's a complex matter!), while Tolkien was a Christian and a medievalist. _Der Ring des Nibelungen_ is, among other modern things, a parable of the world's evolution into modernity. I don't know exactly what Tolkien's objections to Wagner were - to the extent that he understood them rationally, he must have shared them with his Wagner-loving friends (C. S. Lewis among them) - but I suspect his sexless novels, with their simplistic dichotomy of good vs. evil, would have struck Wagner as glorified children's literature.


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## Forster (Apr 22, 2021)

Quite. The parallels with Christianity are just as important in the Tolkien as are the AngloSaxon myths.


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## Shaughnessy (Dec 31, 2020)

Cricket - the VSAdmin - noticed that there was a Wagner thread without the obligatory "wholly gratuitous Hitler reference" and reached out to me to correct the oversight...

In 1938, English author J. R. R. Tolkien and his British publisher, Stanley Unwin, opened talks with Rütten & Loening, a Berlin-based publishing house, about a German translation of his recently-published hit novel, "The Hobbit." - (The prequel to "the Lord of the Rings").

The Berlin-based publishing house sent Tolkien a letter asking for proof of his Aryan descent as per the requirements of the Nuremberg Laws which drew their inspiration largely from Adolf Hitler's autobiographical mega-selling Book-of-the-Month Club selection "Mein Kampf".

Tolkien was somewhat less than pleased by this request and replied with two letters - one of which was sent to the German publishers. -

https://www.good.is/articles/jrr-rolkien-nazi-letter

The British publisher, acceding to Tolkien's request, refused permission to translate and publish the work in Germany... or "Nazi Germany" as it was then known colloquially.

And while "Nazi Germany" apparently had no qualms whatsoever about invading Poland, apparently there are some lines that not even Nazis will cross and one of those lines appears to be "copyright infringement".

"The Hobbit" was not translated and published in Germany until twenty years later in 1957.

If Poland had had the foresight and/or common sense to copyright itself, perhaps World War II may have been entirely averted... or, at they very least, temporarily postponed.


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## ThaNotoriousNIC (Jun 29, 2020)

I am a Lord of the Rings and Wagner fan and actually just recently finished rewatching the extended editions of Lord of the Rings. I think everyone has made some great points so far and the commentary quoted from Alex Ross is a very insightful take as well. I can provide my take on one of the major beats between both of them:

*Gotterdammerung and the End of the Elves/Third Age:* Mentioned throughout the Ring Cycle and and concluding with Valhalla and the Gods being burnt down, the story of Wagner's Ring Cycle goes into the transition of power from the Gods to mankind with the Ring being rightly returned to the Rhinemaidens. In the Lord of the Rings, the elves are in the process of leaving Middle Earth to go to the West to be reunited with the Gods. Their powers begin to fade similar to Wotan's as we see in Siegfried when the titular character breaks Wotan's spear. The elves' loss of power if I remember correctly is in anticipation of mankind's reign over Middle Earth and the final conflict with Sauron over the Ring of Power. The prolonged dread of the end of Gotterdammerung for the Gods in Wagner's operas and of a similar end of the age for elves in Lord of the Rings are treated similarly. The causes for this demise have some parallels as well a they deal with committed sins or acts of defiance. In the Ring Cycle, it is the sins of betraying the giants after they built Valhalla and their failure to give the ring back to the Rhine maidens. In the Lord of the Rings, groups of the elves rejected the wishes of the Gods and left the undying lands to get revenge against Melkor (the Satan of Lord of the Rings) and became in direct conflict with evil. In the Silmarillion, an elf from this group by the name Celebrimbor forged the rings of power under commission by a disguised Sauron (Melkor's right hand man). The circumstances might be a bit different, but I think there is enough in common between the two to make a connection.


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## PAUL CORFIELD GODFREY (7 mo ago)

Comparisons between Wagner and Tolkien operatically can actually be made. Prima Facie have recently completed their issue of my cycle of epic scenes based on _The Silmarillion_ which consists of four evenings: _Feanor, Beren and Luthien, The Children of Hurin_, and _The Fall of Gondolin_. All four feature singers from Welsh National Opera, and comparisons and contrasts with Wagner have been made both by critics and by other correspondents. Reviews from Chris Seeman on the Tolkien Music site described _Beren and Luthien_ as "hands-down the most potent actualisation of Tolkien's writing I have heard" and Brian Wilson on MusicWeb International drew specific comparisons between _The Children of Hurin_ and the ending of _Gotterdammerung_ as "worthy of mention in the same sentence".


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## Bellerophon (May 15, 2020)

I’ve just read an interesting piece on this in Alex Ross’s ‘Wagnerism’. He points out the many borrowings from the RIng in Tolkien; the ring of power itself obviously, but also the fratricide, the sword broken and reforged, the dying tree, the woman who give up her immortality for love, the return of the ring to its source at the end whith one of the characters going down with it.

At the same time it is also anti-Wagnerian, the ring is destroyed not be a heroine but by the humble hobbits (strictly speaking even they fail and it is the evil gollum who unintentionally destroys it along with himself. 

Perhaps most significantly of all, the hobbits go back to their lives as if nothing has changed - no revolution required.


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## Forster (Apr 22, 2021)

Bellerophon said:


> I’ve just read an interesting piece on this in Alex Ross’s ‘Wagnerism’. He points out the many borrowings from the RIng in Tolkien; the ring of power itself obviously, but also the fratricide, the sword broken and reforged, the dying tree, the woman who give up her immortality for love, the return of the ring to its source at the end whith one of the characters going down with it.
> 
> At the same time it is also anti-Wagnerian, the ring is destroyed not be a heroine but by the humble hobbits (strictly speaking even they fail and it is the evil gollum who unintentionally destroys it along with himself.
> 
> Perhaps most significantly of all, the hobbits go back to their lives as if nothing has changed - no revolution required.


That last, not quite true. You're forgetting the Scouring of the Shire, the departure of Frodo and the marriage of Sam.


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