Chapter 38 of 45

2FIRST AND SECOND THINGSWHEN IREAD IN Time and Tide ON JUNE 6 [1942] THAT the Germans have selected Hagen in preference

FIRST AND SECOND THINGS

WHEN I READ IN Time and Tide ON JUNE 6 [1942] THAT the Germans have selected Hagen in preference to Siegfried as their national hero, I could have laughed out loud for pleasure. For I am a romantic person who has frankly revelled in my Nibelungs, and specially in Wagner's version of the story, ever since one golden summer in adolescence when I first heard the `Ride of the Valkyries' on a gramophone and saw Arthur Rackham's illustrations to The Ring. Even now the very smell of those volumes can come over me with the poignancy of remembered calf-love. It was, therefore, a bitter moment when the Nazis took over my treasure and made it part of their ideology. But now all is well. They have proved unable to digest it. They can retain it only by standing the story on its head and making one of the minor villains the hero. Doubtless the logic of their position will presently drive them further, and Alberich will be announced as the true personification of the Nordic spirit. In the meantime, they have given me back what they stole.The mention of the Nordic spirit reminds me that their attempted appropriation of The Ring is only one instance of their larger attempt to appropriate `the Nordic' as a whole, and this larger attempt is equally ridiculous. What business have people who call might right to say they are worshippers of Odin? The whole point about Odin was that he had the right but not the might. The whole point about Norse religion was that it alone of all mythologies told men to serve gods who were admittedly fighting with their backs to the wall and

would certainly be defeated in the end. `I am off to die with Odin' said the rover in Stevenson's fable,'

The longer I looked into it the more I came to suspect that I was perceiving a universal law. On cause mieux quand on ne dit pas Causons.2

Apparently the world is made that way. If Esau really got the pottage in return for his birthright,'

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