Chapter 1: Bearing the Names of the Gods – A Personal Reflection
Throughout my life, Norse mythology and Der Ring des Nibelungen have held a haunting and intimate significance. They were never simply tales or operatic spectacles to admire from afar—they were frameworks through which I sought meaning, identity, and a kind of coded survival. The themes of fate, sacrifice, power, rebellion, and cyclical renewal resonated with me long before I had the language to understand why. Only later did I realize: these stories had always been about me. Or more precisely, about the names I was given—and the roles I was conscripted to play.
I was named Sieglinde by my father—a man gripped by delusions of grandeur and a psychopathic obsession with Richard Wagner. To him, Sieglinde was not a mere character but a symbol: noble, tragic, and racially and culturally idealized. She was the prototype of purity and suffering, a vessel for greatness through sacrifice. My father did not see a daughter. He saw a heroine of his own private opera, born to serve his myth.
My mother—narcissistic in her own right—gave me the second name: Waltraud. It was not a gift. It was a sentence. In her mind, the name was synonymous with emotional service, with duty and silence, with the thankless labor of caring for those who would never care in return. Waltraud was not just a name; it was a role I was to play without deviation. She projected onto it a mandate: carry the burden. Absorb the pain. Remain loyal. Be useful.
These names—Sieglinde and Waltraud—were never neutral. They were mythic assignments, loaded with the psychic residue of Wagner’s heroines. They dictated how I was seen and, more dangerously, how I was supposed to see myself. I was not given a chance to shape my identity; it was authored for me, stitched from grandiosity and control. I was trapped between a father’s operatic delusions and a mother’s suffocating scripts—between Sieglinde, the tragic vessel of fate, and Waltraud, the silent servant of a decaying order.
But myth can be decoded. Opera can be reinterpreted. And names, however burdened, can be reclaimed.
It was under the weight of these names that I began to study the mythologies they were drawn from. Who was Sieglinde, truly? A tragic figure, yes—but also a woman who carries the future in her body, who escapes a violent past to birth the next cycle of hope. And who was Waltraute, Wagner’s inspiration for the name Waltraud? A Valkyrie, yes—but one who pleads for the salvation of the gods, even as she watches their twilight unfold. One who serves, even when the cause is already lost.
In these characters, I found not just reflections but confrontations—questions about agency, obedience, rebellion, and worth. And in finally understanding them, I began the process of understanding myself.
This essay is not simply about mythology or music. It is an excavation. A retelling. A way to write myself out of the parts I was cast in—and into something of my own making.
Chapter 2: Sieglinde and Waltraud – Mythic Names, Living Roles
Names are not just words. They are stories we are asked to carry. And when those names come from mythology, they carry more than memory—they carry command.
My father named me Sieglinde, after the ill-fated heroine of Die Walküre. In Wagner’s opera, Sieglinde is the twin sister and lover of Siegmund, and the mother of Siegfried, the hero meant to redeem a collapsing world. She is marked by sorrow and violation, trapped in a loveless marriage, and swept into a destiny she never asked for. Yet in the end, she becomes a vessel for something greater than herself. She survives. She gives birth to the future.
To my father, Sieglinde was not a character but an archetype—pure, noble, tragic, and therefore perfect. His Sieglinde was a projection of romantic suffering. My naming was his theater. I was to be silent, beautiful, and significant only through what I could produce or endure.
My mother named me Waltraud, an earthly echo of Waltraute, one of Wagner’s lesser-known Valkyries. In Götterdämmerung, Waltraute visits her rebellious sister Brünnhilde to plead for the return of the cursed Ring. She speaks not with authority, but with desperation. The gods are dying, she says. Wotan sits in silence, surrounded by logs cut from the fallen World-Ash Tree, awaiting the flames that will consume Valhalla. She is a messenger of doom, still faithful, still pleading—still serving a world already dead.
This was the image my mother imposed on me: a loyal daughter, a dutiful sister, a woman who bears the emotional labor of a family in ruins. Waltraud was not chosen in love—it was assigned in expectation.
Sieglinde and Waltraute: two women who serve male power in decline. One through passion and sacrifice, the other through silence and duty. Both woven into me from birth.
I did not understand, as a child, how much mythology had already written my life. But I felt it. I felt it in the suffocation of expectation. In the way my pain was made invisible. In the pressure to serve, to sacrifice, to carry, to redeem.
But in learning their stories fully, I found something else: these women, though tragic, were not powerless. They carried truth. They carried the seeds of change. Sieglinde, though used and cast aside, becomes the mother of transformation. Waltraute, though unheard, dares to speak truth into a collapsing world.
And that was where I began to break the spell.
The Gods Who Failed Us – Odin and Wotan, and the Inheritance of Collapse
Behind every mythic woman stands a failing god.
Odin, in Norse myth, is a god of sacrifice and riddles. He seeks knowledge at any cost, even self-mutilation. He manipulates, deceives, and remains aloof. He gathers the dead to prepare for Ragnarök, knowing he cannot stop it. He is cold, removed, brilliant—and doomed.
Wotan, Wagner’s reimagining, is more human. He longs for escape from the laws he wrote himself. He fathers Siegmund and Sieglinde in secret, hoping they can break the curse he cannot. He dreams of a free hero—but cannot let go of control. His deepest wound is revealed in his love for Brünnhilde, whose defiance mirrors his own hidden hope. In punishing her, he punishes himself.
My father fancied himself Wotan: burdened by genius, misunderstood, betrayed by those who disobeyed him. But in truth, he was neither god nor hero. Just a man who deflected failure onto his daughter—demanding from me the redemption he never earned.
My mother, like Waltraute, whispered warnings no one heard. But unlike the Valkyrie, she served not out of love—but out of fear, control, and denial.
And I—named Sieglinde and Waltraud—was left to carry both their delusions.
Reclaiming the Myth – From Servant to Sovereign
But myth is not fate. And opera is not destiny.
Sieglinde is not only tragedy. She is survival. She is the first to escape, the one who endures, the one who gives birth to something new.
Waltraute, though bound by loyalty, speaks truth. She names the end of things. And truth is always the first step to freedom.
For decades, I lived as their echo—cast in roles I did not write. But in understanding them, I learned to step outside of them. I learned I could also be Brünnhilde: the one who sees the truth, who steps into the fire—not to die, but to end the old world and begin a new one.
Wagner’s Ring cycle ends not with gods, but with transformation. The fire consumes Valhalla. The curse ends. And something new, unnamed, begins.
This is my path now. To unname what was forced on me. To release what was inherited. To see the gods not as rulers, but as relics—and to walk forward, bearing not their burdens, but my own becoming.