Decadent Chronicles 4: Imagining Reality

by Christian Chensvold

Franz Stassen’s illustration for Wagner’s Ring operas (1914)

Christian Chensvold evokes Achilles and Siegfried as mythic templates for rekindling heroic spirit through ritual and imagination in an age darkened by decadence and decline.

Also read parts one, two, and three.

I’ve been searching the web for an image from Wagner’s opera Siegfried while listening to his “Siegfried Idyll” from 1870, a subtle and dreamy piece he wrote as a gift to his wife, based on musical themes from the third installment of his Ring cycle. I finally found the illustration, which was executed in 1914 by an artist named Franz Stassen. As King Triopas of Thessaly says of Achilles at the start of the film Troy, “I shall remember the name.”

But what do the Bronze Age warrior Achilles and the Germanic Siegfried have in common, besides being heroes with fair eyes and fair hair, and who thus spring from the same cosmic well?