Predetermined: Sieglinde and Waltraud

Chapter 1: Bearing the Names of the Gods – A Personal Reflection

Throughout my life, Norse mythology and Wotan from Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen have held a profound and deeply personal significance. They were not merely stories or operatic dramas but mirrors in which I searched for meaning, identity, and escape. Their themes—fate, power, sacrifice, rebellion, and renewal—resonated with me long before I fully understood why. Only later did I realize that these myths and Wagnerian symbols were deeply entangled with the most intimate aspect of my life: my own names.

At birth, I was given the name Sieglinde, a name chosen by my psychopathic father, whose obsession with grandeur and personal mythology led him to grandstand as a worshiper of Richard Wagner. To him, Sieglinde was not just a character, but a symbol of cultural superiority and romantic tragedy—a figure to be admired and idealized. In addition, I received the second name Waltraud, imposed by my narcissistic mother, who projected onto it a heavy, predetermined role. In her world, Waltraud was not simply a name, but a commandment—a binding expectation of self-sacrifice, duty, and emotional servitude. I was expected to embody this role, to carry the burdens of others, and to suppress my own needs and desires for over forty years.

These names, drawn from myth and opera, were not neutral. They carried with them the symbolic weight of Wagner’s heroines, shaping how I was seen, how I was treated, and how I saw myself. They became roles I did not choose but could not avoid—trapped between a father’s operatic delusions and a mother’s psychological scripting. From childhood onward, my identity was forged in the shadows of characters like Sieglinde and Waltraute—each a woman bound by fate, sacrifice, and service to a collapsing world of male authority.

It was this personal burden—this involuntary identification with mythic roles—that eventually led me to explore both Norse mythology and Wagner’s Ring cycle in depth. Through these narratives, I sought to understand the deeper implications of the characters whose names I bore. Who was Sieglinde, truly? A tragic mother, yes—but also a vessel of heroic destiny. And Waltraute? A loyal Valkyrie, yes—but also the voice of a dying order, pleading for preservation in a world already crumbling.

Studying Odin and Wotan, gods entangled in law, fate, and sacrifice, became a way to confront the legacy of control and obligation that had shaped my life. What began as a literary and philosophical interest evolved into something far more personal: a journey to reclaim the meanings of these names and, by doing so, to break free from the roles I had been forced to play. This essay, then, is not just a comparative analysis—it is a process of naming, understanding, and liberation.

 

Chapter 2: Odin and Wotan — A Myth, Music, and Meaning

There is a certain weight that myth carries—especially when myth intersects with personal history. For me, the stories of Odin and Wotan were never just tales from a sagging shelf of mythology or opera librettos. They were living echoes in my own life, part of a lineage of symbols and expectations that had been etched into me from birth.

I was named Sieglinde by a father obsessed with Richard Wagner—an intelligent but psychopathic man who cloaked his authoritarianism in grandeur, casting his daughter as one of the tragic heroines from his beloved German operas. My mother, equally damaging in her own way, added as a second name Waltraud, not in love but as an assignment. For her, the name meant duty. It meant sacrifice. It meant being the one who serves and suffers—quietly, properly, without end.

These names—Sieglinde and Waltraud—were not chosen in affection. They were roles. And in many ways, they were destinies. As I later came to understand, these mythic figures were not fictional. They were prototypes of the parts I was expected to play.

This realization led me to look more closely at the myths themselves. And in particular, at the two towering male figures whose choices—whose failures—defined the fate of the women around them: Odin, god of the Norse cosmos, and Wotan, Wagner’s reimagined patriarch in Der Ring des Nibelungen. What I discovered was not only a comparison between two gods—but a mirror of how authority both shapes and destroys, and how myth can become a blueprint for either submission or transformation.

The Ancient God and the Opera King

Odin, in the old Norse poems, stands at the center of a universe governed by fate. He is the one-eyed seeker of knowledge, willing to pluck out his own eye for a drink from the well of wisdom. He hangs himself on the World Tree for nine days and nights, a god sacrificing himself to himself, to unlock the secrets of the runes. He commands the Valkyries, the choosers of the slain, and welcomes warriors into Valhalla, preparing them for Ragnarök, the final war.

And yet, for all his power, Odin is a god who knows his end. He cannot escape the cycle. He sees what is coming, and walks toward it. He plays the long game, not to win, but to delay the inevitable.

Wotan, by contrast, is Odin recast through human eyes. Wagner takes the distant seer of myth and makes him into a tragic father, a flawed ruler, a man entangled in the very laws he created. Wotan doesn’t simply oversee fate—he tries to outwit it. He constructs Valhalla as a fortress against the future. He bargains with giants, steals a cursed ring, and sows the seeds of his own downfall.

Where Odin sacrifices his eye, Wotan sacrifices his soul.

Two Faces of Power

The personalities of Odin and Wotan diverge in the way power shapes them. Odin remains aloof, enigmatic, a shadow on the edge of the battlefield or the forest. His wisdom is cold. His compassion, if it exists, is hidden beneath layers of necessity. Odin is distant—a god of ravens and riddles.

Wotan, on the other hand, is deeply human, even in his divinity. He longs—not only for knowledge—but for love, for freedom, for a way out of the trap he built with his own hands. He dreams of a “free hero” who can do what he cannot. But in trying to circumvent the very system he built, he collapses into despair. His relationship with Brünnhilde, his Valkyrie daughter, is where his pain is most visible. Her rebellion is his failure—and also his deepest hope. In punishing her, he punishes the part of himself that still believes in redemption.

Symbols of Collapse

Odin’s spear, Gungnir, is unerring. It is a symbol of divine power, of authority that cannot be challenged. It pierces, it commands, it brings death. His two ravens, Huginn and Muninn—Thought and Memory—circle the world, reporting back what they see.

Wotan’s spear is something else entirely. It, too, is a symbol of power—but a power bound in contracts. His treaties, carved into the wood, become chains. The spear becomes the embodiment of his inability to change course. And when Siegfried shatters it, it is not only a symbol of the end of Wotan’s rule—it is the collapse of divine authority itself.

Where Odin walks willingly into death at Ragnarök, Wotan does not die. He withdraws. He stops speaking. He vanishes into silence, leaving his children to deal with the wreckage of his ambition.

The Fall of the Gods

Odin’s narrative, in the myths, is cosmic. He sees the end from the beginning. He sets the pieces in motion, then watches them play out. When Fenrir, the great wolf, devours him, it is not a tragedy—it is fulfillment. The end makes way for the new.

Wotan’s narrative is intimate, operatic, and psychological. His downfall unfolds over the course of four operas:

  • In Das Rheingold, he makes deals that bind him.

  • In Die Walküre, he tries to bend fate through Siegmund.

  • In Siegfried, he appears as a weary Wanderer, testing the new generation.

  • In Götterdämmerung, he is absent, waiting for the flames to rise.

It is Brünnhilde, not Wotan, who redeems the world. Not through divine might—but through human love and sacrifice. Where Odin dies by fate, Wotan fades by guilt.

Waltraute: The Silent Servant of a Dying World

And then there is Waltraute. One of the lesser-known Valkyries in myth, she becomes something far more in Wagner’s vision: a messenger of collapse. She appears to Brünnhilde in Götterdämmerung, carrying not weapons, but sorrow. She tells of Wotan, who now sits silently in Valhalla, having felled the World-Ash Tree. The logs are stacked around the hall. He waits—not to rule, but to burn.

Waltraute begs her sister to return the Ring. Not for glory, but in desperation. The gods, she says, can still be saved.

But Brünnhilde refuses.

In that moment, Waltraute becomes more than a character—she becomes a symbol of inherited duty, of those who still serve even as the system they serve is crumbling around them. She is loyalty without hope. She is obedience in the face of silence.

I know that role too well.

The Names We Inherit

Being named Waltraud—so close to Waltraute—was no coincidence. It was a designation. An assignment. Like her, I was expected to serve, to shoulder the emotional weight of others, to remain loyal long after the cause had withered into silence. And as Sieglinde, I was cast as the mother of a future hero, the quiet vessel meant to carry forward someone else’s destiny.

But myth is not fate, and opera is not prophecy.

As I studied these stories—tracing the resignation of Odin and the downfall of Wotan—I began to understand that my inheritance was not unchangeable. I could be Brünnhilde, too: the one who saw through the illusion, who stepped into the fire not because she was told to—but because she chose to.

Though Wotan was inspired by Odin, Wagner reimagined him not as an untouchable mythic being, but as a symbol of decline—a reflection of a world unraveling under the weight of its own moral contradictions. He is not the god who watches the end come; he is the god who causes it.

For me, the comparison between Odin and Wotan has never been purely academic. It has always been visceral. Personal. Through the symbolic burden of the names Sieglinde and Waltraute, or Waltraud, I was handed roles that echoed the tensions at the heart of myth and opera: obedience versus defiance, service versus selfhood, fate versus freedom.

In their stories—and especially in the women they leave behind—I found the reflection of my own life: the burden of identity, the pressure to fulfill a script I did not write, the aching desire to be more than what was assigned. In Brünnhilde’s defiance, I finally saw a path out of duty, out of silence, out of inherited roles.

Myths endure because they carry truths too deep for ordinary language. And sometimes, to understand our own lives, we must look to the gods—not to worship them, but to let them go.

In exploring these myths, I came to see that Brünnhilde’s choice—to sever the past, to sacrifice everything for love and renewal—offered something I never imagined possible: a way beyond the prison of expectation. Wotan and Odin taught me the cost of knowledge and power.