Dear Ron:

Needless to say, it would take me forever to respond to every detail of your series of lectures on Wagner’s Ring, of the resemblances of aspects of Tolkien’s books to it, and of its massive implications for how we can understand what it is to be human. The primary thing I loved about your lectures is that they provide a window into the innumerable questions which Wagner asks about the human condition and man’s destiny. That’s my main takeaway from your lectures: you ask many of the questions that need to be asked.

So, since a comprehensive response would take me an eternity to complete, I’ll just respond briefly to a few of your observations which struck me as having the most resonance, not by way of critique but simply to complement what you said. Since you jump back and forth somewhat from one of the Ring’s four parts to the others in each of your lectures, in spite of each lecture being more or less dedicated to one of the Ring’s parts, I’ll just follow the chronological order of your online lectures rather than try to break them down by the numbered sequence of recordings.

You note the Ring asks us to make sense of our life as science or myth, reason or romanticism. The whole point of my Ring book has been to demonstrate that Wagner’s drama concerns precisely the relationship between these two aspects of man’s psyche in the course of history. Of course, he’s seeking to discover whether they can be reconciled. As Scruton put it, man as object vs. man as subject.

You note, as Deryck Cooke did, that Alberich seeks to compensate himself for the loss of love with the acquisition of power. My book presents this as a metaphor for man’s evolutionary transition from our pre-lingual animal ancestors into symbol- using man who, unlike his animal ancestors, is capable of increasing his power over himself and his environment over time cumulatively through the acquisition of knowledge.

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