One Ring for the Dwarf Lord in his hall of stone ….
As different as they seem, Oberon/Auberon, the king of the fairies in British and French folklore (and thus in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream), originates as a variation on Alberich, the dwarf king of Germanic folklore, whom Richard Wagner in turn combined with the Icelandic dwarf Andvari in his operatic mashup of Germanic and Icelandic versions of Norse mythology together with the Rhinemaiden legend, the Hesperides legend, and Feuerbachian and Schopenhauerian philosophy, in his Ring Cycle which kicks off with Das Rheingold, here adapted in 1995 as part of the “Operavox” series:
The visual portrayal of the Rhinemaidens may be influenced by Arthur Rackham’s:
Freya, by contrast, looks as though she stepped out of a 1970s sword-and-sorcery comic:
And Loge (Wagner’s mash-up of Loki the trickster-god with Logi the fire-god) strongly resembles the Marvel Comics trickster character, the Impossible Man:
