surrounding the mountain peak; and turns his back on Brynhild for
ever.

The allegory here is happily not so glaringly obvious to the
younger generations of our educated classes as it was forty years
ago. In those days, any child who expressed a doubt as to the
absolute truth of the Church's teaching, even to the extent of
asking why Joshua told the sun to stand still instead of telling
the earth to cease turning, or of pointing out that a whale's
throat would hardly have been large enough to swallow Jonah, was
unhesitatingly told that if it harboured such doubts it would
spend all eternity after its death in horrible torments in a lake
of burning brimstone. It is difficult to write or read this
nowadays without laughing; yet no doubt millions of ignorant and
credulous people are still teaching their children that. When
Wagner himself was a little child, the fact that hell was a
fiction devised for the intimidation and subjection of the
masses, was a well-kept secret of the thinking and governing
classes. At that time the fires of Loki were a very real terror
to all except persons of exceptional force of character and
intrepidity of thought. Even thirty years after Wagner had
printed the verses of The Ring for private circulation, we find
him excusing himself from perfectly explicit denial of current
superstitions, by reminding his readers that it would expose him
to prosecution. In England, so many of our respectable voters are
still grovelling in a gloomy devil worship, of which the fires of
Loki are the main bulwark, that no Government has yet had the
conscience or the courage to repeal our monstrous laws against
"blasphemy."