The Ring of the Nibelung/Roy Thomas and Gil Kane

The Ring is mine!

Over the course of my lifetime I’ve been exposed to Richard Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung in many and various ways. The story, or pieces thereof, from the Old Norse literature upon which the operas are based. The thematic content from modern works like The Broken Sword and The Lord of the Rings. Even the music, which I’ve heard in various and sundry films including Apocalypse Now ("The Ride of the Valkyries") and Excalibur (“Siegfried’s Funeral March," "Prelude to Parsifal").

But I haven’t ever seen the opera nor read a full literary treatment of the work. And was overdue to scratch this niggling itch … but wanted to have some fun, with a low bar to entry. And so, I scooped up a treatment I did not know existed until quite recently: Richard Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung, the complete graphic novel as adapted by the great Roy Thomas and Gil Kane, with Jim Woodring.

This was enjoyable. I plowed through it in just a few hours over a few nights. It’s a product of DC Comics, released in 1991, and checks in at a relatively hefty 191 pages. It includes some welcome introductory material, including a foreword introducing the biography and talents of the authors, and an introduction to Wagner’s opera cycle by Brian Kellow of Opera News.

The Ring of the Nibelung is a somewhat complex story, with four acts/operas (Wagner prefers music dramas) spanning long periods of time, told through different sets of characters ranging from gods, giants, and dwarves to the heroic albeit mortal race of humans known as Nibelungs. It starts with the creation of the world, and ends with its downfall at Ragnarok. The centerpiece is the story of Siegfried, a mortal hero sent to slay a dragon, reclaim the gods' stolen gold and rescue the Valkyrie Brunnhilde. These stories are bound together by a golden ring that grants its wearer dominion over the world. Yes, there are some Tolkien parallels here, which JRRT denies and to be fair he likely drew on Wagner’s common influences, not the operas. But we’ve got a greedy dragon hoarding wealth, a precious ring fought over by two brothers (one of whom kills the other to take it for himself), a broken sword reforged, and many other familiar elements.

Overall it's a gorgeous, epic, deeply thematic story well told by Thomas—and as you’d expect from his pen, it moves. Kane’s artwork is marvelous, beautiful, comic booky and muscular but not garish. The men are jacked and the women beautiful. Rather than me attempt to word-paint here are some of the panels:

What does it all mean? There’s a lot to dig into, too much for me after one rapid reading of an adaptation in graphic novel form. But The Ring is undoubtedly a Great Story, and like all great stories contains truth. I’m quite fond of Sir Roger Scruton’s “Reflections on The Ring of the Nibelung,” which he describes as a story for “modern people, for whom the path to heroism is overgrown.” 

From that essay:

Wagner’s story of gods and heroes, of giants and dwarfs, is not a fairy tale. It is addressed to modern people, who have lost the ways of enchantment, and for whom the path to heroism is overgrown. It is a story in which law and love, power and property are all caught up in a life and death struggle between the forces that govern the human soul.

Love without power will not endure, and power without law will always erode the claims of love. We live this paradox, and without the gods to maintain the moral order the burden of it falls entirely on our shoulders. 

Gods come and go; but they last as long as we make room for them, and we make room for them through sacrifice. The gods come about because we idealize our passions, and it is by accepting the need for sacrifice on behalf of another that our lives acquire a meaning. Seeing things that way we recognize that we are not condemned to mortality but consecrated to it. Such, in the end, was Wagner’s message. Yes, the gods must die, and we ourselves must assume their burdens. But we inherit their aspirations too: freedom, personality, love, and law. There is no way in which we can achieve those great goods through politics, which, if we put too much faith in it, will inevitably degenerate into the kind of totalitarian power enjoyed by the dwarf Alberich. But we can create these things in ourselves, and we do this when we recognize the sacred character of our joys and sufferings, and resolve to be true to them.

For more reading and listening, check these out:

Reflections on “The Ring of the Nibelung”

Wagner Götterdämmerung - Siegfried's death and Funeral march Klaus Tennstedt London Philharmonic