WOTAN WANTS HIS TOYS BACK (Published 1988)
- ️Sun Feb 28 1988
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- Feb. 28, 1988
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EXPECTING SOMEONE TALLER By Tom Holt. 218 pp. New York: A Thomas Dunne Book/St. Martin's Press. $15.95.
This chummy little novel is a sequel to Richard Wagner's opera cycle ''Der Ring des Nibelungen,'' set mostly in a rural area of contemporary England. By stealing Wagner's characters and adding some of his own, Tom Holt purports to answer the question: What if the Master of the World were a nice person?
As the novel opens, a timid, scrawny but extremely nice auctioneer's clerk is speeding along a dark country lane when he runs over a badger, who turns out to be Ingolf, the last of the Frost Giants, younger brother of Fasolt and Fafner. The dying Ingolf reveals that he has been Master of the World for the past thousand years as a result of his possession of the Ring, which confers godlike power, and the Tarnhelm, which confers, among other things, the power to assume any shape.
It seems that the events of ''Gotterdammerung'' had a hitherto unknown epilogue. As the Rhinedaughters were drowning Hagen, they dropped the Ring, which Hagen had snatched from the dead Siegfried's finger. ''And guess who was only a few feet away, clinging to a fallen tree, as I recall. Me. Ingolf. Ingolf the Neglected, Ingolf the Patient, Ingolf, Heir to the Ring! So I grabbed it, pulled the Tarnhelm from the ashes of the pyre, and escaped in the confusion.''
Ingolf says he has spent the millennium disguised as a badger because his brother Fafner had changed himself into a dragon and suffered the consequences of being conspicuous. Now that he is about to die, he transfers the Ring and the Tarnhelm to Malcolm, even though the latter does not look like a Ring-Bearer. ''I was expecting someone rather taller,'' says Ingolf.
Ingolf also makes Malcolm drink some giant's blood, which, as Wagnerites know, confers the power to understand the language of the birds, who turn out to be a worthy lot, though rather prosaic. ''I'm a woodpigeon,'' says one. ''And we care about things.'' This bird points out that Ingolf, a surly type, had encouraged the Ring to use its power only to cause trouble ''by thinking unpleasant thoughts. Hence wars, progress and all the rest of it.''