The Interrelations of Knowledge and Will: Erda, Experience, and Epistemology in the Ring

Erda, the sleeping earth goddess of knowledge, is often relegated to the background of Ring interpretations; the commentary about her is frequently as vague as her own prophecies. By comparison with her daughter, Brünnhilde, she is arguably less vital and unquestionably less involved in world events—which she foresees but in which she rarely participates. By the end of the cycle, when Brünnhilde is on center stage, Erda has slipped away into a double oblivion: not only entirely disconnected from world events but also probably forgotten by most of the audience.

Natural though it may be—and I explore the reasons for this below—our obliviousness to Erda deprives us of some significant insights into the world of the Ring. She plays the roles of both goddess and mother, and in each of those capacities she has something to teach us. As goddess of knowledge, Erda reveals much about epistemological concepts in the Ring, particularly through the contrast between her first and second onstage appearances. As mother of Brünnhilde, she partakes in the remarkable parallelisms that Wagner arranges between his older and younger generations. Just as Siegfried's decisions and mistakes may be compared with those of Wotan, Brünnhilde's history may very fruitfully be compared with Erda's; the parallels are clearest when one considers the sexual relationships of Wotan with Erda and Siegfried with Brünnhilde. While these two pairings differ in one very important respect—the presence or absence of love—the ways in which they balance knowledge and power share a common trajectory.

A typical presumption in most of the all-too-brief commentaries on Erda is that she is unchanging: whatever she is and represents in Das Rheingold must therefore remain the case in Siegfried. ¹ I shall argue, on the contrary, that Erda's position and capabilities change between her two onstage appearances—not because she herself has changed but because the world is being transformed around her. Erda's two scenes differ in three significant ways. In Das Rheingold she comes of her own accord to share her superior knowledge; both her words and her music clearly dominate the scene, as Wotan's submissive attitude reveals. In Siegfried, she is summoned against her will by Wotan; his knowledge of world events is superior to hers and when the two gods clash verbally and musically, their control of the scene is much more nearly equal. ²

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Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that considers questions about knowledge. How do we know that something is true? Are there different ways of knowing and different levels of certitude? We need not concern ourselves here with how philosophers answer these questions about the world we actually inhabit but rather simply observe how these matters work in the fictional world of the Ring cycle.

Characters in the Ring draw their knowledge or, more skeptically speaking, their beliefs, from four main sources:

(1) direct experience: Sieglinde watches as Siegmund is killed, and therefore she knows that he is dead.

(2) being told: Brünnhilde believes that Wotan is the father of the Wälsung twins because he tells her; Siegfried believes that Mime wants to kill him because the Forest Bird tells him.

(3) inward sense: Siegmund and Sieglinde are strangely drawn together, feel a kinship, see and hear physical resemblance, and realize that they are brother and sister. (This knowledge also depends on their awareness that each of them was separated from a twin in childhood, but that fact is clearly not enough to "prove" in any way that they are each other's twin.)

(4) dreams: Erda's dreams predict coming world events.

A full consideration of knowledge in the Ring is far beyond the scope of this essay. Carolyn Abbate has approached one aspect of Ring epistemology by asking whether Wotan's narration to Brünnhilde is truthful; in so doing, she...