Lia’s Reviews > The Ring of Truth: And Other Myths of Sex and Jewelry > Status Update

I thought the Siegfried commentaries were incredibly cynical, but then I got to the bits about rings as commercial products in modernity ...

" Claude Lévi-Strauss pointed out long ago that the reason myths keep repeating the same stories, with variants, over and over, is because they pose problems that cannot be solved. This is surely true of the tale of Siegfried and Brünnhilde."

GMTA? That's how I feel, but I hope to be proven wrong.

"Where does it leave Sigurd? As a sexual predator, who furthermore betrays his friend and blood-brother. The neat solution has therefore proved unacceptable.” The neat but unacceptable solution is that Sigurd/Siegfried knowingly does all these things. The texts therefore keep trying to cloud his moral responsibility with rings and potions."

Wow. Someone said it out loud. That's basically how I feel too.