it had seemed bad enough; but this is a thousand times worse, and she cannot understand the god’s cruelty.  Arrived at Gunther’s home, she of course recognises Siegfried in his own shape, and knows by the ring that it was he, changed by the tarnhelm, and not Gunther, who had broken through the fire a second time.  Her sorrow changes to fierce anger; she denounces him, and says he has not kept faith with Gunther; he does not remember anything that occurred previous to drinking the potion, knows he has been true to Gunther, and goes joyfully off with his new bride.  Gunther thinks he has been dishonoured; Brunnhilda is furious at her betrayal; Hagen wants to get the ring; and the three decide that Siegfried must die.  There can be no explaining away the draught.  In Tristan it is not essential that the philtre is a true love-philtre, but here the case is different.  If it symbolizes, as has been suggested, a sudden passion for Gutruna, then Siegfried is an out-and-out blackguard, and not the hero Wagner intended.  Besides, if the loss of his memory leads to the sacrifice of Brunnhilda, afterwards its sudden return, due to another potion, leads immediately to his own death.  We must accept these potions as part of the machinery.  If we do not grumble at talking dragons, tarnhelms, flying horses and fires and magic swords, we need not boggle at a couple of glasses of magical liquid.

In the last act Siegfried, out hunting with the Gibichung tribe, finds himself alone by the riverside.  The Rhine-maidens beg the ring from him; he refuses, and they tell him that this day he must die.  The other hunters arrive, and Siegfried, drinking the second philtre, tells the story of how he first won Brunnhilda.  That is Hagen’s opportunity:  to avenge Gunther he stabs Siegfried in the back.  To the tremendous funeral march the body is carried over the hills.  It is brought into the hall of the Gibichungs.  Gunther has pangs of remorse, but Hagen, only half-human, has none; the pair fall out, and Gunther is killed.  Gutruna wails, as a woman will when she loses her husband and brother within a quarter of an hour; Hagen goes to take the ring from Siegfried’s finger, but the corpse raises its hand menacingly and all draw back aghast.  Brunnhilda enters; all now has become clear to her, and she resolves that she, like Wotan, will renounce a loveless life—­a life based on fraud and tyranny.  She tells Gutruna that Siegfried has never belonged to her—­is hers, Brunnhilda’s; and on receiving this crushing blow, Gutruna creeps to her brother’s side and lies there, miserable and hopeless.  He is dead; but he was the list of her kin and only friend, and, robbed of even the memory of Siegfried, to be near his dead body seems better than nothing.  Then Brunnhilda commands the funeral pyre to be built and the body of Siegfried placed on it; she chants her song in praise of love, mounts her horse Grani, and rides through the fire into the Rhine.  Shouting “The ring!” Hagen dashes after her; the ring has returned to the maidens, and Loge, unchained, mounts up and Walhalla is consumed.  So ends the third subsidiary drama of the Ring.