BRYNHILD

Concerning the Rex Nemorensis, we can recognize in the symbols employed that the notion of kingship derives from having married or possessed the mystical force of "life," of transcendant wisdom and immortality that is personified both by the goddess and by the tree.

Nemi's saga, therefore, incorporates the general symbol, which is found in many other myths and traditional legends, of a winner or of a hero who possesses a woman or a goddess. The goddess appears in other traditions either as a guardian of the fruits of immortality or as a personfication of the occult force of the world, of life and of nonhuman knowledge, or as the embodiment of the principle of sovereignty (the knight or the unknown hero of the legend, who becomes king after taking as his bride a mysterious princess...One of the gifts the Emperor Frederick II received from the mysterious Prester John was a ring that renders invisible and victorious the one who wears it. Invisibility, in this context, refers to the access to the invisible realm and to the achievement; in Greek traditions the hero's invisibility is often synonymous with his becoming immortal...This was the case of Siegfried in the Nibelungen, who through the same symbolic virtue of becoming invisible, subjugates, and marries the divine woman BRYNHILD. BRYNHILD, just like Siegfried in the Sigdrifumal, is the one who bestows on the heroes who "awaken" her the formulas of wisdom and of victory contained in the runes.