and found the work first-rate: there is nothing to be done but
pay the price agreed upon by handing over Freia to the giants.
The gods are furious; and Wotan passionately declares that he
only consented to the bargain on Loki's promise to find a way for
him out of it. But Loki says no: he has promised to find a way
out if any such way exist, but not to make a way if there is no
way. He has wandered over the whole earth in search of some
treasure great enough to buy Freia back from the giants; but in
all the world he has found nothing for which Man will give up
Woman. And this, by the way, reminds him of the matter he had
promised to lay before Wotan. The Rhine maidens have complained
to him of Alberic's theft of their gold; and he mentions it as
a curious exception to his universal law of the unpurchasable
preciousness of love, that this gold-robber has forsworn love for
the sake of the fabulous riches of the Plutonic empire and the
mastery of the world through its power.

No sooner is the tale told than the giants stoop lower than the
dwarf. Alberic forswore love only when it was denied to him and
made the instrument for cruelly murdering his self-respect. But
the giants, with love within their reach, with Freia and her
golden apples in their hands, offer to give her up for the
treasure of Alberic. Observe, it is the treasure alone that they
desire. They have no fierce dreams of dominion over their
superiors, or of moulding the world to any conceptions of their
own. They are neither clever nor ambitious: they simply covet
money. Alberic's gold: that is their demand, or else Freia, as
agreed upon, whom they now carry off as hostage, leaving Wotan
to consider their ultimatum.