Erda (Wagner)

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Erda is the name of an earth goddess in Richard Wagner's tetralogy The Ring of the Nibelung . It appears in two parts of the tetralogy, in Das Rheingold and in Siegfried .

With his opera character "Erda" Richard Wagner created an art figure of his own kind. When asked in a letter (1856) he named the sources for his work:

  • Nordic sagas of gods and heroes
  • Jacob Grimm's "German Mythology" (1835)
  • The Nordic song collection Edda

He took the name "Erda" from the chapter "Goddesses" in Grimm's "German Mythology". "Erda" is the old high German word for "earth". In Norse mythology the name of the earth goddess is Jörd .

For a more detailed design of his earth goddess in the "ring", he established a close connection to the Norns and Valkyries from the Nordic sagas of gods and heroes. He made his Erda the mother of the three Norns and Brünnhilde . For Wagner, the father of this Valkyrie is the main Nordic god Odin (" Wotan "). He found the details of his Erda concept that were important for Wagner in two songs of the "Edda".

Balder's dreams

Wagner took the form and the name of a seer from this poem, and changed the Old Norse word Völva to “Wala”, the second name of his earth goddess. It means "seer", "omniscient". At the same time, he found the motif of the "awakening" of the seer among other details. In the "Edda" however it is the awakening of a dead seer, in the "Ring" it is the awakening of the earth goddess sleeping in the depths of the earth.

The seer's face

For Wagner, this second poem emphasizes the motif of “omniscience” in the sense of prior knowledge. This shows the adoption of the fundamental aspects of "Götterdämmerung", "End of the World" and "Hope for the Future" in the overall concept of the "Ring of the Nibelung".

The design of the fictional character “Erda” is - to put it in a nutshell - a creative achievement by Wagner, which can be described as downright “myth-making” because Wagner succeeded in creating an unmistakable, unique figure from several different sources, from which one could assume that it would be found this way and not otherwise in Norse mythology.